| Do you see it, too (Finally, in 1986, Averbakh saw it as well, writing: it is a creation of genius)? There's a checkmate in twenty moves, below. Apparently composed 13 centuries ago, in Babylonia, by As-Suli in the Court of Caliph Harun-ar-Rashid, as featured in the one of the earliest remaining books, entitled: The Thousand & One Arabian Nights. The rules of the puzzle are Shatranj, and so, the Queen is really a Firzan (both its move and attack are one move at a time, but only diagonally outwards), and not yet a Fers (with its immediate choice of a leap), its Mediaevil successor. The name stems from the Rank of the Aparzan, a Tent Commander-in-Chief of an Army. Another rule of Shatranj at the time is that immediately prior to the appearance of a bare King position, stalemate would only occur if the side with the bare King can also immediately take sufficiently much material to strip bare both Kings. Otherwise, the side with the bare King is also checkmated. 
click for larger viewThe hints are that:
(i) white may make progress if it were black, in zugzwang, who was compelled to move, (ii) there is a mirror-diagonal solution which can assist white in the pace of his progress, (iii) is it possible in the game for a King to mate with a Queen (er... Firzan)? Sources: Oxford Companion to Chess (terminology), and seen once as a puzzle in the Globe & Mail, of Jonathan Berry. ----
This forum is able to serve as a temporary forum (this is because it may not exist in the future, if the user's premium or forum settings are reset - therefore, please do not link to this as a forum page; it might be better to also raise a question/comment at another kibitzing area, if one wants to refer to it in the future) to discuss ways to improve rejected collections prior to tournament resubmission. In addition to the admins with "delete posting" privileges, the owner of the forum may decide to "weed out or delete" old posts that allowed collections to later get fixed, or which turn other forum traffic on this page to other matters that become less relevant to chess or are in violations of posting guidelines. The idea for the forum is to keep such player and tournament biography traffic to a necessary minimum (since the owner of the forum reserves the right to close it if the page's traffic size becomes unmanageable), and possibly to also allow more of a split between cglibrarian posts at her forum, or other (player) biographical posts to the bistro, or to address (tournament) biography conventions that appear to be popular or useful. Commentary would generally be accepted from bio-writers, and other normal users would be able to poll whether they like the tournament creation choices that might be demanded from a popular percentage of normal users to see potentially implemented (of course, tournament collection creations would still have to go through a more or less formal administrative process) before normal users could salivate over seeing a grouped collection being accepted. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inde... |
f5, black transposed back to K Nemcova vs A Gavrilov, 2011 0-1, employing 7 ... 
