The First Monday Chess Puzzle!

Hello everyone, for today’s post, the subject will be the premiere of my new video series entitled “The Monday Chess Puzzle.” The title is self-explaining in what the series is all about. Every Monday I will publish a new video that explains in depth the solution to the chess puzzle featured in each video. For the first Monday Chess Puzzle, I used a chess composition by Johann Sehwers (1868-1940), a Latvian chess composer.

Johann Sehwers was also a linguist and teacher at the University of Zurich. However, Sehwers is best known for composing about 100 final play studies, most of which were published in 1922. The particular composition I used for the Monday Chess Puzzle can be found in the following diagram below. Can you solve it?

If you had difficulty solving the composition, here is my video breaking it down step by step:

I was so impressed with this composition when I first encountered it here on chess.com’s tactics trainer that I decided to search for any compositions from Sehwers I could find. I did manage to find a chess composition database and added three more of his compositions in this post as a tribute to Johann Sehwers.

white to move and mate in five:

white to move and draw:

white to move and draw:

I hope you all enjoyed this post and stay tuned for next week’s edition of the Monday Chess Puzzle!

Sincerely,
Charles Collier