My Puzzling Journey With The National Solving Championships

The National Solving Championships is open to all British Residents to compete in solving very difficult chess problems. With a prize fund of up to £1,500, this annual event offers an exciting challenge for aspiring chess solvers who pride themselves on tackling tough puzzles. As an added incentive, the winner of the final will earn a place on the Great Britain team for the World Solving Championships - A competition where Team GB often end up in the finals. As a puzzle solver myself, I wanted to enter into this competition to see how I get on with hopes that I would be able to, at least, make it into the finals...:

Around 5 years ago, I entered into this annual competition with naïve hopes of whatever fame and glory could possibly come from solving very hard chess puzzles. After a grueling qualifying puzzle in which I needed to spot a tricky castling solution to be able to solve the problem, I sent in my solution full of smugness and arrogance; I was unaware of what would come next...:

Then came a letter through the post... I thought to myself: It's not my birthday; who sends letters these days!? As I slowly opened the letter, I was greeted by a familiar wall of black white: I had received a load of chess puzzles to solve in order to get into the finals. After a few quick glances followed by inevitable head shakes, I knew the task of solving all of these puzzles would be far too great for my mortal brain; I did not proceed any further...

After years of solving compositions (and admittedly forgetting to send in my solutions to the annual competition), I thought it was finally time to compete in this again with dreams of making it into the finals once more.

My hopes are that when I receive my puzzles through the post again, I will upload my attempts on this blog on how I solve these tricky compositions (or simply dramatically fail in solving them).

The qualifying puzzle for this year stood in front of me like a towering behemoth. In this "flightless king" 9+8 M2 puzzle was a confusing mix of pins, cross pins, x-ray defenses and zugzwangs. It is a very hard problem that took me some time to solve. However, whilst it took me only 5 minutes to find the first move, it then took me an additional 20 minutes to go through all the proofs with a chess friend as they were 22 legal moves from black each with interesting solutions attached to them.

Here is a detailed video solution that I have provided which does through all of the solutions to this fiendishly hard puzzle: 

I hope to continue to be able to share my journey in this competition and I hope that readers will be interested in how and get on and (more importantly) see some beautiful chess problems.