A nice Candidate !

A very cute mate.  

Simple, but if you are not careful it could slip away from you...

Also made more interesting in that the game it came from was Maxime Vachier_lagrave - Tiemour Radjabov !

White to play

Faulty board vision.

This is a simple problem, but yet I have failed it a couple of times.

White to Play

Even though I know I registered the Queen pin, I played the very bad Rxd6.

I can only think that I saw the pin from the Black Queen to the White Queen ( maybe because my natural view is up the board ?), so imagined that it was my piece that was pinned.

Having thought that, I didn't switch my mind around to view other points of view, nor did I calculate White's response, which is evidently NOT Rxe5, but is the deadly Qe1+, winning the Bishop. !

Clearly, I need to make sure I look at all possibilities, and not just focus on what I want to happen.



The below is also a common issue.

White to play

My mind has immediately focused on the mate pattern with Qb3->Qh8, and even though it doesn't work, it seems I cannot stop focusing on it, so I try to MAKE it work, play what my faulty thinking has made me believe must be right, and I fail.

Of course the reward on offer here is not an immediate mate, but gain of material, which is a simple thing to see if you can look clearly and without a 'mate obsession' !

Its also the situation you are more likely to experience in a real game, so an encouragement to shape a thinking process to use.

Anderssen - Mayet, 1851

I found this a fiendishly difficult problem, mainly because you have to find a distinctly not "normal" move as part of the solution.

The Andersssen in question is Adolf Anderssen, who gave us both the 'Evergreen' and 'Immortal' games as part of his legacy.

This problem arise from a game Anderssen-Mayet, in Berlin, 1851 (same year as the Immortal game, but a different venue and victim).  


I can't find the entire game, but here's the problem, White to Play

White to Play

Perhaps I should add the extra information that the first two moves need to be accurate ( there are no significant ALTs in ChessTempo-speak) but after that mate will arrive.

Guards ! Guards !

My chess brain still manages to avoid seeing some things, particularly involving Knights..

Below, I saw the threat of a draw from White, and the fact the knight could stop it ( and therefore noted that the knight could not move, unless it gave check ).

What I did not see was that the Knight giving check and being captured, allowed the discovered attack on the Rook capture and subsequent mate...problem solved, if I had but seen it !

Black to play

The best of a choice of good moves

This problem was one I "failed", although in this case it would not have meant disaster or losing in a real game, but rather not finishing the game as fast as you should.

Here, the correct move is actually the choice of the best of a number of good moves, and that makes it harder.

White to play

The endgame...just calculation

I think it was a Daniel King video I watched where he said that the endgame in chess was just calculation, especially when down to a small number of pieces on the board.

He showed how it was done, introduced endgame studies, and how they could help improve both endgame understanding and calculation.

This isn't a study, but it is a very simple problem, as long as you just think it through.

White to move after Ne5-f3