Looking for bridge in the East Anglian Daily Times? Read the latest article.
Saturday, 2-February-2019
An echo of an earlier post (2009-04-17): this diagram appeared in today's Guardian:
The text reads: White (to play) is five pieces ahead and the black king has no legal move, so how can white mate in four after a single virtually forced sequence?
Have a look before reading on.
The statement of the problem contradicts the published diagram – but this is the Guardian after all. How do you repair the problem and solve it?
I decided that aesthetically the position deserved a knight on g4 and in any case, a bishop on g3 would allow black too much freedom and didn't work. I also noted Leonard Barden's phrase 'single virtually forced sequence', the columnist's oft-used description for the work of Fritz Giegold (1903-1978). The problemist delighted in anti-positional key-moves and forced lines thereafter.
Those clues led to the Turton themed key 1. Qd8! and … c6/g5 2. Rd7 g5/c6 3. Rd2 exd2 4. Qxb6#
I sent this to a few friends – without the Ng4, with the location as a clue. I copied the diagram from the Guardian website (hence the funny pieces) but they'd corrected it. So I had to white out the g4 square for the hardcopy experience. Curiously, indexes/searches of Leonard Barden's columns still show a clip of the broken diagram.
The position was set up on the coffee table and spotted by early arrivals for a meeting. One, having ascertained it was a problem, was explaining the artificial nature and, without taking stock, said that the key would be something no-one would ever consider in adversarial chess. "Like this", he said, flicking out 1. Qd8!
