Blogs
Visualization Puzzles #3

Visualization Puzzles #3

Avatar of Bab3s
NM Bab3s
Show your flair!
| 4

In the previous post, I said that I read "books". What I neglected to mention, though this may be obvious to you, is that not all books are good for the kind of exercise I propose doing. For example, Understanding Chess, which I used for the last set of problems, has few variations to use and goes many, many moves without diagrams. You would basically be doing the difficult puzzle of my first post over and over again.

As a child, I read Eric Schiller's books constantly, in particular Unorthodox Chess Openings, World Champion Combinations, and World Champion Openings. Though I'm now not fond of his style of prose, he does space out his diagrams in a very "reader friendly" way so that I could just train my visualization forever with his books. Anyway, I just now opened My System for the first time and quickly found good problems to use from the book. So maybe you will see a lot of My System in future posts. Also, I'm going to run out of nuggets of wisdom at this rate. Don't expect me to keep up this pace of making posts.

Easy:

1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Bc5 4. b4 Bb6 5. b5 Nd4 6. Nxe5 Qg5 "with a strong attack"

What strong attack? Nxf7 just wins, right?

Medium:

1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Bc5 4. c3 Nf6 5. d4 exd4 6. cxd4 Bb6 (this was an odds game where White had no rook on a1 but the pawn was moved to a3, so that's why not ...Bb4+) 7. d5 Ne7 8. e5 Ne4 9. d6 cxd6 10. exd6 Nxf2 11. Qb3 Nxh1 12. Bxf7+ Kf8 13. Bg5 why did Black resign in this position?

Difficult:

1. a6 Qa8 2. b3 Rb8 3. Ba3!! Rxb6 4. Bxd6 is, amazingly enough, a draw. The threat is Rxg7 followed by Be5 and check on the 7th and 8th ranks forever. If 4...Qxa6 so that Black's king can eventually run to b7, then 5. Be5 Ke8 (only way to not get checkmated) 6. Rh8+ Kd7 7. R6h7 Qa2+ 8. Kg3 c5 (again, the only way to not get mated) 9. Rxg7+ Kc6 10. Rxc7+ Kb5 11. Rxc5+ Ka6 12. Ra8+ winning the queen and the game. If you followed this far, then I have two questions for you: was 7...Qa2+ actually suicidal, and is it really true that the position after 4. Bxd6 is a draw?