Thursday, May 9, 2013

A Simple Puzzle




Today in chess club two of the students reached this position with black two move. It's a pretty straightforward position with a huge material advantage to black. I have two puzzle questions?

1. What is the best move for black?

2. What did black play?

Should the day come when I ever get around to writing and publishing a book, a free copy goes to the first person to correctly answer both of these questions correctly in the comments.

6 comments:

  1. Well, the best move is obviously b1/N#
    But the move played? Well, it depends on the age/skill of the students and the time left. Obviously the kicker is to queen with stalemate; but if I was in time trouble and just didn't visualize the under-promotion, I'd probably just play Ka4 and then queen with check on the next move.

    ReplyDelete
  2. That should be Ka5, not a4... :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. preface: dont know the terminology for this biz

    1. queen to C3

    2. pawn to B1 and promote to queen

    ReplyDelete
  4. 1. The best move is b1=N with immediate checkmate.

    2. The student (a young one, as most of mine are)played b1=Q stalemate.

    I think that Leon and Steve are co-winners of the theoretical book.

    ReplyDelete