Chess Online

This was a good puzzle, and it took me a couple minutes to figure it out. Very nice!

It is only a two mover but I was there for five minutes I reckon. I suppose with two movers people can make their three mistakes and get a hint then get the solution quickly enough. Then they put the fact that they didn´t get it in their three moves down to bad luck or the fact they are no good rather than the puzzle being good. It is easy with two movers afterwards to see the solution and think to yourself "that was obvious,why didn´t I see it" rather than "Good puzzle, had me".

Si fuese erróneo el motor que ayuda a generar los puzles no te permitiría introducirlo como mate en 2.

Además, fíjate que este puzle es una composición de 1906. Seguro que si estuviera mal no habría podido ser publicado.

I gave this one three stars myself. The key move is not at all obvious, and takes some imagination to find.

As someone said once, in a 2 moves mate the first move isn't usually a check  

So, keeping that idea in mind my personal process to solve the puzzle was:
The king: Moving it I can't cover all the black king's moves to mate in the next move. Even more, the only logical square to place it cuts the diagonal for the queen. So that's not the way.

The Queen: Whatever you move the queen, either rows, diagonal or columns, you can't mate in a 2nd move, because the black king has more than one square to move and keep safe from the mate and you queen doesn't have any other piece to support it.

The bishop: OK, it seems that the bishop is the answer and it's supposed you have to move it to a square where it can support the queen for checkmating. But if I put it in the main diagonal I block the queen's path to the black king and in other diagonal it does nothing to mate with the queen in the next move. So, where do I have to put it? It was the when I realised that the only square is c8, if black king takes it you can checkmate in a8 and it it's not taken you can checkmate with the queen in b7.

Of course that was my way but, as you can see, it wasn't a matter of imagination but a simple process of eliminating the alternatives. It may sound a bit weird but maybe it would cost me much more to find out the answer if the puzzle had had more pieces.


Sorry for the long post ...

On of the tougher easy ones though.

The difficulty rating moved up to 2.5 stars, and the Solved percentage moved up to 37%.

Given that most people failed to solve this one, this certainly doesn't belong in the "easy" category.

As I said before, puzzles should get ELO ratings for difficulty instead of just stars.

Perhaps a user rated star system is not the fairest. We know that some people analyse a puzzle before solving (I am not complaining, that is what it´s there for) but 2 movers with few pieces suffer especially on this because as Sherlock says "eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" and when you only have a limited amount of possibilities it is therefore easier to find the solution and may affect how difficult you rate a puzzle. Also we see that 37% solved this with this less than three incorrect tries (and a large number of the 37% must have analysed first) yet the 63% who failed either gave it no rating or a low rating? Perhaps a system where the amount of time taken to solve a puzzle would be more accurate rating of difficulty? If a person fails to finish the puzzle then a default time should be given. Making a wrong move could add 30 seconds to your solve time (obviously if you analyse you wouldn´t get any penalty for a wrong move) and asking for a hint could add a minute. Then we could as measure accurately against each other! And the difficulty rating would be fact orientated.

Mr Kingdawar provides some quite remarkable puzzles here. It took quite some time for me to solve it. Thank you very much for these great exercises.

liked it , beautiful checkmate

phonybenoni, THANK YOU. thank you for your long post. i wish there were more like it. playing chess, the hardest thing for me is to organizing and sticking to a system of thought. i think what you described is exactly how imagination works, but slowed down. you imagined possible scenarios with a specific goal in mind until you found one that worked.

and you're right (and it doesn't sound weird), the process you described would cost more time and energy if there were more pieces but maybe not much more. in regards to me, if there's a full board with pieces all over the place, i'll find the major pieces first starting with the queen and do the same thing you did. i think that's why pawn mate puzzles are rare and good to find because it's the least likely piece on a full board to finish off a king. though, it does happen!

your post was exactly what i needed.

...Qa8#. So it could take it but it's mate next turn anyway.

after 1. Bc8 the dark king has two choices, and the Mighty Gameknot Puzzle Computing Machine (MGPCM or Magpiecom) selects one randomly. Both choices have the same result for Black: CHECKMATE.