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Feb-15-12
 | | kevin86: Like a quadratic equation-a chess puzzle can have TWO correct answers. My move was ♕h7  totally equal to Ms. pulgar's text move,♕g7+ |
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| Feb-15-12 | | alshatranji: Very interesting position. The two sides are at each other's throats, and apparently the first to move gets the chance to win, but they have to be very decisive. Nothing more decisive than a queen sacrifice. |
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| Feb-15-12 | | gregkoch: <alshatranji: Very interesting position. The two sides are at each other's throats, and apparently the first to move gets the chance to win, but they have to be very decisive. Nothing more decisive than a queen sacrifice.> This is why the idea of time (tempo) in chess is very, very important. It literally drives me crazy if I find myself losing a tempo during a game, especially if later on that one tempo could have been used to finish off the game. Also, having to choose between 33.Qg7+! or 33.Qh7+! in an OTB game would honestly make me spend several minutes of my clock time. Both lead to the same mate, but I would be bothered by thinking about which one is the better move. |
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| Feb-15-12 | | TheoNov: If I would guess how Polgar was thinking here, this is a crafty trap, and Black fell right in with 32...Qxg2??. Without this trap, White has nothing. But it is easy to see how even a GM could get overly excited about his "crushing attack" and not realize the hidden danger... I'm starting to notice that even GMs frequently play for traps, only theirs are much harder to see than mine! |
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| Feb-15-12 | | alshatranji: <Once>, very thoughtful comments. But I think you can simply substitute "check" with "sacrifice", to make a similar, and I would say, a more convincing argument. I think this is what the essence of combination is about: you give up some material in return for some acceleration in energy or firepower (someone may think of better terms). I may go further and say this is the dynamic the underlies the game of chess: the balance between material and firepower, and how one can be converted into the other. |
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Feb-15-12
 | | LIFE Master AJ: << <Once> And in chess we have a button to make an attack go faster. Only our button is called "check". If we can string together a series of checks, it's like our opponent is standing still - that old knight rider trick of surrounding KITT with lots of ordinary cars driving v.e.e.e.r.y sl..o..w...ly. <<<<>>>> >> Bravo! (And well done.) And full of unusual info. [Do you test drive all the new models? Or do you just read mags like "Car and Driver," or is there some other source for your fount of bizarre facts?] |
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| Feb-15-12 | | Marmot PFL: 33 Qg7+ wraps it up, leading to a common pattern where white can check forever with 2 rooks on the 7th rank, but needs another piece cut off black's king. here he has that, in the B controlling f8. An unnecessary loss for black, as instead of 32...Qxg2??, 32...Re4+ or Qe1+ should draw. |
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| Feb-15-12 | | VincentL: "Medium/Easy".
A mate can be effected here.
33. Qg7+ !
Upon 33....Kxg7 white continues 34. Rfxf7+ Kg8 35. Rg8+ Kh8 36. Rh8+ Kg8 37. Rbg7#.
If 34......Kh8 35. Rh8+ Kg8 36. Rbg7#. If 34. Kh6 Rh7#. 33. Qh7+ also works, with a similar continuation.
So far this week I would say Tuesday´s puzzle was the easiest, this the next easiest and Monday´s puzzle was the most difficult. |
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Feb-15-12
 | | Once: <alshatranji> That's a good point, although sacrifices can be declined. We sometimes need to act more quickly if the opponent is threatening mate in one or (as today) to force exchanges down to level position. A sacrifice without a check may not be enough in a double-edged position. All things considered, I think I'll stick with my contention that a check is the chess equivalent of a turbo button. And a sacrifice ... let's call that the off-road button which sets up the 4x4 for some dirt driving. There is something wonderful medieval about the power of check. In the days when folk believed in the divine right of kings, it was felt to be sacriligous to kill a king. Even if that king was the ruler of some foreign land, he still could not be killed. And that, I think, is why the rules of chess do not allow us ever to take a king off the board or to place our king in check. It's also why we must announce check and why checkmate = shah mat = "the king is helpless" and not "the king is dead". |
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| Feb-15-12 | | Nemesistic: <Once> Your writing skills are wasted here, you should write a book your posts here are very clever.. And i do hope the buck toothed beaver apologises to you at some point for his past attacks on you, but i wont be holding my breath! |
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| Feb-15-12 | | SuperPatzer77: < Kevin86: Like a quadratic equation-a chess puzzle can have TWO correct answers. My move was h7 totally equal to Ms. pulgar's text move,g7+ > <Kevin86> LOL LOL. I used to be a math major. Aren't/weren't you a math major? <Kevin86> My math theory is 2 + 2 = 5 (that's a joke) LOL LOL During my college years I loved playing with the numbers in Calculus, Linear Alegbra and Differential Equations. SuperPatzer77 |
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Feb-15-12
| | Once: I did try - admittedly not very hard - to get some chess writing published. Chess Life weren't interested. They gave me one of those "we'll put your name on file and contact you if anything comes up" replies, which actually means "no". And similar responses from a couple of others I tried. Okay, so I didn't press it and I haven't approached newspapers, but my feeling is that they want GMs with household names. For a while I wrote a column for the British magazine "chess", which was supposed to pay a small amount. At first it was a thrill seeing my name in print. The column was called "Once in a lifetime", with the idea that the main reason we rank and filers play chess is that <once in a lifetime> we might pull off a memorable combination. And that's where my handle came from.
The appeal of writing a column soon faded. The money was not exactly what you'd call life changing and anyway they had a habit of forgetting to pay me. But the real problem for me was there was no interaction. I only <once> got a bit of feedback about my columns and that was from someone who pointed out a mistake I had made. Apart from that - nothing, zip, nada. So I thought long and hard about it and decided that I wanted to put my chess writing efforts into this site. It doesn't pay a bean, it's not going to make me famous, and the stuff I write gets hidden from view within 24 hours of writing it. But what matters is that you guys give me feedback. Good or bad, it doesn't matter. If I write something that I'm really proud of but no-one says anything or I get criticised, then that's really useful information for me that maybe it wasn't as good as I thought it was. Nothing is as honest (or as useful) as an audience booing or slow-handclapping. It's a healthy dose of realism if I'm getting too full of myself. So if you can put up with me, this is where I intend to stay. If you don't like my flights of fancy and feel they don't belong on a serious chess site, then do feel free to put me on ignore. I won't be in the least bit offended. As to a collected works ... I suspect if you read more than a couple of my efforts in one sitting they would seem more than a little bit repetitive. So perhaps it's best if we treat them as disposable little whimsies, like the cartoons on the back page of a newspaper. |
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| Feb-15-12 | | Nemesistic: On the contrary, i dont find them repetitive whatsoever, and i thoroughly enjoy reading them daily.. And i was just about to ask where you got the <Once> name from as well! Their loss is our gain :) |
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| Feb-15-12 | | mworld: i went with Qh7+. |
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| Feb-15-12 | | MiCrooks: LifemasterAJ: curious...you looked at Qh7+ and didn't notice that it leads to the exact same mating pattern as Qg7+? You must have been distracted... |
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| Feb-15-12 | | M.Hassan: <absolutezero7: Why doesn't 33.Rbxf7 work?> White becomes weaker as the result of 33.Rbxf7!!. I have done the analysis, it is on page 3 Regards |
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Feb-15-12
 | | Check It Out: That's a great idea - the selected chessgames.com works of <Once>! Definitely worthy. |
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| Feb-15-12 | | rapidcitychess: I am really forced to look at this like a kamikaze mission. A desperate attack against the base to stop the black advance. Because at this point it looks like it is not black, but white, that is against a divine storm. But appearances are often deceiving. You can't give up and say black is going to win here, even though it looks like the atomic bomb is going to get dropped. You need to strike at the very capitol and end it now. Qg7+ is the only possible way to do this, and lo and behold, it does work, once you can bring in the heavy artillery. |
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| Feb-15-12 | | Cibator: <LIFEMasterAJ>: Gerald Abrahams once remarked that for some reason sacrifices on empty squares are harder to spot than those involving a capture. Here of course there were two - so did that make the thing twice or four times as hard to solve? Somebody else (Kotov? Or possibly someone he was quoting?) suggested that one should always look at every way of putting one's pieces en prise, in case one of them on closer examination turns out to be a sound or at least playable sacrifice. Being an otherwise rather unimaginative player, I've certainly found it to be a useful part of my own "checklist". In solving this position, one gets a lot of help from knowing that White "has something" (else it wouldn't have been set as a puzzle). Finally, I wonder what COKO would have made of this position. Two equally efficacious mating continuations - how to decide between them?
(COKO was that computer program c1970 which failed to mate in one because there was a mate in two as well which according to its evaluation instructions was "better" .... result was, it just kept shuffling its king around until it eventually even lost the game.) |
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| Feb-15-12 | | MaczynskiPratten: <Once>: Nice to hear your story; I had often wondered! Maybe CG.com could be persuaded to publish a book, I for one would buy it. It doesn't matter if each article is episodic. I remember Miles Kington's articles many years back and these were simply collated together in the book "Welcome to Kington"; they made delightful reading, you could simply dip into them one at a time or as many as you liked. Your style is not dissimilar (or at any rate it appeals to my sense of humour in the same way). |
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Feb-15-12
 | | chrisowen: A mouth in she egg one h6 h7+!
In game continuation g7 back rooks in seventh a looter it mopping up pine f3 is chute tell i phantom ghost in g1 catch in unaware kingside a which came first h7 or g7? Clove tincture a dam mate in for rook queen glorify it heading off in which at a flood rxf7 kg8 rg7+ kh8 rh7+ kg8 rg7# At aint it molar on air grinds la board ferret rook up fx7 try in nearly it is h7 o wells right on track in g7 reminds me ago in light winawer hunker it down eaves tibia in see a link again castle short it a4 now in black it dog in dig? Alive que1+ cop out qxg2 in slow again stop for prolong dongle ne7 still drawn ti bet! 6...b6 7.qg4 kf8 have lift off ok hermit queen game for one jaunt nice in kingside empty it to the brim tread fires king really catch offside again get in from it black counter-play back rook e8 it hopes in e1 after d3 it weed in fashion it g1qg2 squabble in success it h7 lo! |
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| Feb-15-12 | | Yodaman: I bet that Polgar saw the rest of the moves in the game (and beyond to the mate) before shed played 27.Rd3. |
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| Feb-15-12 | | polarx: <Once>, respect! |
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Feb-17-12
| | LIFE Master AJ: << Feb-15-12 Cibator: <LIFEMasterAJ>: Gerald Abrahams once remarked that for some reason sacrifices on empty squares are harder to spot than those involving a capture. Here of course there were two - so did that make the thing twice or four times as hard to solve? <snip> <<<<>>>> >> Thanks!!! Good post, I enjoyed reading it! |
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| Feb-17-12 | | SimonWebbsTiger: @<cibator>
Alas, I don't have a copy of "Think Like a Grandmaster" at hand. I know what you refer to though. Kotov mentions a Soviet Master who would check any possibility to sacrifice and when convinced there weren't any offers which worked he would move onto more positional thoughts! |
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sac: 33.Qg7+