Kings In The Middle - Original Chess Puzzles By RALRAL3333, chesschallenge72, and cjxchess16

A little while ago, I came up with an idea to collaborate with other chess.com users into making some puzzles for my blog. I thought that it would be an interesting new idea to try, instead of making all of my chess puzzles by myself. This turned out to be an interesting idea, and with the help of fellow Chess.com users, we were able to come up with some fun puzzles very quickly. We communicated in the following forum: https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/does-anyone-want-to-make-a-chess-puzzle-with-me

and came up with some wonderful ideas. The common idea was checkmating a king after it had been forced to the middle of the board, relatively early in a game. chesschallenge72 came up with the original theme for the puzzles, although we were only thinking of making one in the beginning. Then, I made that original idea into a relatively simple puzzle, which was then further developed into three similar puzzles, by the two other users I was working with (chesschallenge72 and cjxchess16).

Previously, I have only created puzzles by myself, and very recently, I posted a puzzle by cjxchess16: https://www.chess.com/blog/RALRAL3333/the-deadly-sacrifice-on-g7-an-original-chess-puzzle-by-cjxchess16

This was my first time making a chess puzzle with other chess.com users, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

This was the original idea for the puzzle (I have not counted it as one of the three puzzles). I used chesschallenge72's original idea to come up with a simple puzzle which only has two moves. The two problems with this were that it was too short, and that the move to take the knight was not forced. I hoped that the puzzle could be changed so that taking the knight would be forced, but this was just the basic idea that lead to our three final puzzles.

Here is the first puzzle that was created from the original idea. chesschallenge72 edited the small puzzle I had made (above) and made it into a puzzle where taking the knight was forced, and it was a longer and more complicated puzzle due to more pieces and more moves. It was the first real puzzle, and this was going to be the only one posted, but then, cjxchess16 posted another puzzle with the same ideas as chesschallenge72 and I had come up with originally. It had the same general idea:

This puzzle is another puzzle that is very similar to the previous two in the blog, but it has its own originality to it. This puzzle was contributed by cjxchess as another variation of the one that chesschallenge72 and I had originally come up with. I decided to post both; they are unique in their own way.

Then finally, here is the third puzzle, which chesschallenge72 made up as another variation of the original idea. Here, the black king goes for a little run around the board. 

In all three puzzles, the black king was in the middle of the board early, which ultimately did not end well. All of these puzzles were based on an original idea, which is how you should start making any chess puzzle. You start with an original idea, and then work on it, until you find an interesting composition. Multiple interesting puzzles can occur while they share a similar idea as shown in this blog post. All of these puzzles were very similar, but they each were different in their own way. 

To end this blog post off, I would like to thank chesschallenge72 and cjxchess16 for their contributions to this project. I would love to work with more chess.com users in creating even more puzzles for my blog. And one last thing, comment below on which of these puzzles you liked best.

Thanks for reading!

Ral