White rook in a dominant or active position, not under immediate attack by Black pieces.

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

SAE concept sae_28012 fires when white rook in a dominant or active position, not under immediate attack by Black pieces.. It appears in 30 of 9,950 Climbchess puzzles (0.3%), spanning ELO 785–2170 (median 1634).

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This page documents White rook in a dominant or active position, not…, 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 in a dominant or active position, not under immediate attack by Black pieces.

This pattern fires in 30 of our 9,950 tagged puzzles. The puzzles where it appears span ELO 785 to 2170, with a median rating of 1634. 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:

• Hook mate pattern: rook-and-knight cooperation delivering mate to a cornered… — similarity 0.100
• A rook is on a back-rank square and is involved in a back-rank or skewer tactic. — similarity 0.075
• A white rook on the first rank or an open file, coordinating with the king in… — similarity 0.061
• A pawn on any rank is under pressure from an enemy rook, often in a deflection… — similarity 0.061
• Detects a back-rank square contested by a white rook or queen and the black… — similarity 0.057

Example puzzles

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

• Puzzle xyzzA_M — ELO 785, themes: arabianMate, discoveredAttack, endgame, side to move: Black
• Puzzle zykiH_M — ELO 1018, themes: endgame, mate, mateIn2, side to move: Black
• Puzzle zyK8q_M — ELO 1226, themes: endgame, master, mate, side to move: Black
• Puzzle 01LsE_M — ELO 1407, themes: crushing, endgame, long, side to move: White
• Puzzle zxoIi_M — ELO 1461, themes: advantage, endgame, long, side to move: Black
• Puzzle 01T20 — ELO 1634, themes: crushing, endgame, short, side to move: White
• Puzzle 01RxX — ELO 1714, themes: advantage, endgame, long, side to move: Black
• Puzzle baTAu — ELO 1992, themes: arabianMate, endgame, exposedKing, side to move: White
• Puzzle wgl84 — ELO 2154, themes: arabianMate, endgame, mate, side to move: White
• Puzzle oWqyI_F — ELO 2170, themes: endgame, hookMate, mate, 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).