How I Made My First Ever Chess Puzzle
Hello! In this blog post I will be taking you through my thought process of making my first ever original chess puzzle. Also, if you were wondering, I will continue the series "Top 20 Best Chess Players of All Time" a different time.
Spoiler: Please do not let the thumbnail of this blog fool you as in the end, the puzzle didn’t get the all mighty double exclamation mark from Chess.com. I just held down E and left clicked the square I wanted to put an emote on. Sorry about click-baiting you.
I got inspired by seeing a chess game known as "The Peruvian Immortal" which was a very short game but ended with a spectacular queen sacrifice for checkmate.
Now I had seen this game a few weeks prior, but didn't look into it at all. After I saw this game again, an idea popped into my head... I wanted to make the same kind of queen sacrifice, and after the bishop gives a check, blacks pawn would block and I would have a pawn there to deliver en passant checkmate! I immediately started trying to make a position where this is possible.
Try #1:
Not only was the position illegal (because there was no white king), but I very quickly realized that no pawn could go 2 squares up to block the check, not to mention Ba6+ wasn't even checkmate. I then tried to improvise by moving the king and the pawns up.
Try #2:
Try #2 was a success, at least in terms of setting up the en passant mate. I then took away all the kings legal moves so that en passant was actually checkmate... but I forgot one thing... TOO ADD THE WHITE KING!! I was quite upset at myself for forgetting this very important detail. I quickly then recopied down the position and this time, I added a bunch more pieces for black so that black was up material. I knew this most likely wasn't going to be brilliant, but just for the possibility, I did it.
I then did the game review and found out that the position glitched and the rook that cut the king off the d file got deleted!! Therefor, the king could simply just go to d6 and black is relatively safe compared to getting checkmated. I lost the position unfortunately so I can't show it. I then set up the position 5TH TIME and guess what... There were other checkmates in the position as well. I was just about to quit until I had an idea. I was going to place pieces (or pawns) in the places where the other checkmates would be (in this case g2 and f3) to get rid of the other checkmates. I setup the position for the final time AND IT WORKED!! I quickly showed my friends the puzzle and they loved it! So here is the final puzzle!:
An Amazing Queen Sacrifice for En Passant Checkmate!:
Fun Fact: I made this puzzle in 9 minutes.
To a lot of people, this puzzle is very simple, but for me, since this was my first ever original puzzle, I felt extremely proud of myself.
Thank you for taking your time to read my blog post!
Edit: I just realized I could have just copied the FEN instead of having to setup the position over and over again lol.
