Thursday, February 2, 2012

Alternate Solutions

My first tournament game since starting this blog is coming up Friday night. The Silver Knights Chess team is playing in the DC Chess League against the Black Nights. I'm expecting to play against one of a couple of NMs with the white.

Looking through a tactics database I’ve been building up recently, I ran across a puzzle that had frustrated me on the server chesstempo.com. This is an interesting puzzle, so it’s worth taking a few minutes to figure out how you would play for white.


Have you tried the puzzle yet?


The first things I noticed were the unsafe black king and black’s seemingly annoying threat of gxh2+. Deciding that I shouldn’t let black take over the initiative, I decided to focus on checks and came up with what I thought was a great solution, particularly since it required calculating a mating net six moves away which forces black to sacrifice a rook.

1.Rd8+ Bxd8 2.Qxd8+ Kh7 3.Rb7+ Kh6 4.Qd2+ g5 5.hxg3! (setting a mating net on the h-file)Kg6 6.Qh2 Rf1+ (forced) 7.Kxf1 1-0

It was pretty disappointing when I went to play the first move of this line and the website told me, “Your move is good, but it is not the computer’s first choice. Please try again.”

My pride shot, I eventually found the line that the computer finds marginally better, 1. Rb7 hxg3+ 2. Kh1 Qc6 3. Rxc7 and white will win black’s queen for a rook.

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