Tuesday, October 24, 2006

 

570th Brilliant Way to Checkmate

Black to Move


Here's another from Reinfeld's 1001 Brilliant Ways to Checkmate. I had the right idea but messed up the calculation on this one... the devil is in the details! I like when a problem puts together a couple of simple themes and makes something that is tough, so I thought I would post it.


... Rd1+ 2. Kh2 Rcc1 3. Bf4 Rh1+ 4. Kg3 Rh3+ 5. gxh3 Rg1+6. Kh2 Rh1+ 7. Kg3 Rxh3# 0-1


Thursday, October 19, 2006

 

Indirect Threat

I got in a little blitz and thought I would post one of the really nice opportunity I missed in time pressure. This one looks like it is right out of TCT.

Black to Move


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...
..
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I ended up playing the klunky ...Kd6, aiming to march the Black King over to the White Rook. I missed the wonderful ...Rf1, quietly threatening ...Rxf2+ and promotion simultaneously.


Saturday, October 14, 2006

 

Mate in 19?

I have been busy recently, and that means very little chess. One annoying thing that I spent alot of time on was problem #557 in Reinfeld's 1001 Brilliant Ways to Checkmate. I correctly came to the conclusion that if Black refused a Rook sacrifice, it wasn't checkmate anytime soon. The book was naive in its answer and didn't explore the variation. I fed it to Fritz, and it couldn't even get to the final mate without pushing pieces to quicken the pace of calculation. Ugh... and I thought I liked checkmate problems (lol).


So here is the question: is forced mate in 19 moves really a checkmate problem?

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