White rook actively placed on an open file or rank, often near the opponent's king, participating in tactical motifs such as skewer or interference.

By Climbchess Research · 2026-05-08 · 3 min read · Updated May 8, 2026

SAE concept sae_22660 fires when white rook actively placed on an open file or rank, often near the opponent's king, participating in tactical motifs such as skewer or interference.. It appears in 26 of 9,950 Climbchess puzzles (0.3%), spanning ELO 723–1838 (median 878).

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This page documents White rook actively placed on an open file or…, one of 4,505 interpretable chess concepts extracted from Leela Chess Zero via sparse autoencoders. The full feature description from our SAE labelling pipeline reads:

White rook actively placed on an open file or rank, often near the opponent's king, participating in tactical motifs such as skewer or interference.

This pattern fires in 26 of our 9,950 tagged puzzles. The puzzles where it appears span ELO 723 to 1838, with a median rating of 878. That distribution tells you whether this is a beginner cue or a master-level subtlety.

Pattern statistics

Related concepts

The five concepts most often co-firing alongside this one (Jaccard similarity over the puzzle co-occurrence graph) are:

• Contested central or open-file square where the side to move initiates a… — similarity 0.103
• Rook actively placed in a mating or forcing configuration, often participating… — similarity 0.083
• Black bishop on an active diagonal that is contested or under exchange… — similarity 0.073
• White king in a relatively safe position in a rook or mixed endgame, not under… — similarity 0.068
• Active black rook in an endgame, often on an open file or rank, participating… — similarity 0.053

Example puzzles

Below are 10 puzzles spanning the rating distribution. Each links to its own page with full move list and related concepts.

• Puzzle zqkRF — ELO 723, themes: crushing, endgame, rookEndgame, side to move: Black
• Puzzle zqkRF_M — ELO 723, themes: crushing, endgame, rookEndgame, side to move: Black
• Puzzle ztnUm_M — ELO 728, themes: advantage, endgame, rookEndgame, side to move: Black
• Puzzle zx0yA_F — ELO 808, themes: crushing, discoveredAttack, endgame, side to move: Black
• Puzzle kiNbX_F — ELO 855, themes: crushing, endgame, interference, side to move: Black
• Puzzle zpVC1_F — ELO 878, themes: crushing, endgame, rookEndgame, side to move: White
• Puzzle 00nji — ELO 1142, themes: advantage, endgame, short, side to move: Black
• Puzzle 01liD — ELO 1169, themes: endgame, mate, mateIn1, side to move: Black
• Puzzle 01liD_M — ELO 1169, themes: endgame, mate, mateIn1, side to move: Black
• Puzzle zdLIY_M — ELO 1436, themes: crushing, endgame, master, side to move: Black

How to use this page

If you want to train this pattern, open the Climbchess trainer and filter for puzzles tagged with this concept. The trainer surfaces them at the right difficulty for your current rating, and tracks how often you spot the cue versus miss it. You can also browse the related concepts above to see neighbouring ideas in feature space.

Climbchess concepts are not heuristics written by a human author. Each one corresponds to a single direction in the residual stream of Leela Chess Zero that activates on a specific board feature, then was labelled by reading the top-activating positions. This makes the catalogue exhaustive (every Leela-detectable pattern is in here somewhere) and falsifiable (you can replay our extraction).