r2r1n2/1p2bk2/2p1p2p/1n1q4/p2PN1QP/P1P3R1/5PP1/7K w – – 0 1
White to move. Can White salvage this game? How should White proceed?
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Qg7+, forced Ke8, Qxe7+, forced Kxe7, Rg7+, forced Ke8 again, Nf6#
Nice one. I saw this sacrifize followed by the same mate once and remembered it immediately now.
That shows that remembering patterns really can be helpful. 🙂
Wow, that one took me a long time to find (with a chessboard, too) — I have never seen this one before.
I saw right away that any of several checks forced the king to e1, where there was a potential royal fork of king and queen on f6, except that the square was controlled by the black bish.
So I thought the solution was to win the black queen by finding a way to deflect the bish and then apply the royal fork.
Ironically, I was right, except that the royal fork ends up checkmate, and white has to give up the queen to deflect the bish and then chase the king back to e1 again.
Very elegant puzzle, and for such a ‘linear’ puzzle that has all checks and only a single forced reply each move, I still found it very hard to find for several minutes.
It was the game by Viktor Korchnoi vs Andris Peterson, USSR championship, 1964-65.
Why so complicated?
Qh5+ and mate on the next move.
1. Qh5 Qxh5 and where is the mate?
Superb one. I like the question “Can white salvage this game”. When the real question is.. “White to play and win”
Took me some 3 minutes to find.. and wow…what a mate.
Qg7+ Ke8, Qxe7+ Kxe7, Rg7+ Ke8, Nf6#
I saw this in maybe twenty seconds, and tvtom usually does a much better job than I.
I thought I was good at tactics, but maybe I’m just quicker at recognizing hopeless lines, since no alternatives really spring to my attention in this position. Practice as they say make perfect, I’ve seen a lot of hopeless lines in my time.
“I saw this in maybe twenty seconds, and tvtom usually does a much better job than I.”
Sometimes I get them right away; sometimes I am just blocked. I’m surprised I didn’t get this in 20 seconds too, as usually the forced mates with all checks I get right away.
My goal is to learn better pattern recognition, so that the solutions intuitively ‘feel right’ and jump out at me, and then I can use the other side of my brain or whatever to crank out the analysis and prove that there’s a mate or win with the move.
“I thought I was good at tactics, but maybe I’m just quicker at recognizing hopeless lines, since no alternatives really spring to my attention in this position. Practice as they say make perfect, I’ve seen a lot of hopeless lines in my time.”
Well there seem to be two complementary skills needed. One is to spot good candidate moves to check out. The other is to weed out worthless dead-end moves. There’s always that Type I and Type II error thing going on, that if you minimize one you get too much of the other, so there has to be a balance.