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The Kuwaiti Chess Problem
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The Kuwaiti Chess Problem

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Stahlspiel
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Hello everyone!

I usually post blogs in Portuguese, but today I will do different. I will (try to) write in English. I hope you enjoy.

We always love to find mate sequences. There's a interesting one in the diagram below that you may like to find. Can you do it?

You see that this is a funny puzzle. But do you know the history behind this problem?

Once a strong Kuwaiti player saw this diagram and was intrigued. This same player wrote to a Kuwait journalist (who also played chess) saying that the diagram was fun and cool and he also asked if that position could arise from an original chess position. It's not difficult to understand what must be done. The first thing we must think is that the a-pawn was already there, the b-pawn made a capture, the c-pawn made two captures, etc.

Therefore, in the end there should be 15 captures. As the king is the only black piece that is still on the board and each color has 16 pieces, so the problem is mathematically possible. After this episode, the strong player managed to mount a game (obviously with unusual and bizarre moves) which in the ending game arrived in this position after about 50 moves. 

So the journalist also tried to do the same. After a certain time, the player returned with new news saying ''I managed to make in 40 moves!" , and after an amount of time he said "I managed to make in 35 moves"!. The journalist, who also enjoyed the game, tried to do too. He did it in 34 moves!

The game he set up looked like this:

Amazing, not? In the middle of the game you can see some brilliant moves like promoting to bishop, queenside castling to let the king closer to the corner and we also have the self-sacrificing knight.
That’s one of the joke chess problems. These problems, as the name itself says, involve humor and can be of the most diverse types. Some involve only the only moves on the winning side, like this:

Some of them can be really strange. In some cases there may even be violations of rules, as is what occurs in the diagram just below. In the diagram, mate in 1 for white, which in the original rules is impossible. However, the color of the pawn promotion was not specified, and because of this, white promote the pawn to black horse, taking from the monarch the only remaining house and giving checkmate. 

In the next diagram white mates in three, starting with 1. e7, with the main variations being:

  1. ... Kd3 2. e8=Q gxf3 3. 0-0-0#;
  2. ... Kxf3 2. e8 = R! [Not promoting to queen. In some cases this is necessary, such as when you have a situation where you have a knight and you cannot promote to any other piece than bishop because the draw occurs if you promote to knight, queen or rook] d4 3. 0-0#;
  3. Kxf3 2. e8 = R! Kg2 3. 0-0-0-0#!

In the last variation white castles with his newly promoted rook, moving his king to e3 and the rook to e2.

 I hope you enjoyed it and didn't mind my mistakes in English, haha. Thank you for reading.