
Amazing puzzle (Stock-fish cannot solve it)
This post is gonna be analysis and history of an amazing puzzle created around 1970 by Gijs Van Breukelen, a dutch endgame composer.
He showed it to some friends and they would have a crack on it. It didn't become famous until 1987 when English grandmaster James Plaskett showed to Frederic Friedl, the director of the Bruxelles tournament in 1987, where a lot of very strong grandmasters including Kasparov, Karpov, Tal, and Nigel Short participated.
And as the story goes, Frederic Friedl loved the puzzle and the players that were competing at the tournament would come and have a crack on it after they would finish the game.
I found an image of this tournament:
We have Karpov and Kasparov analyzing their game and Mikhail Tal at the back, smocking the cigarette.
Below is the ranking of the tournament: We have a shared first place between Kasparov and Ljubojevic, in third place Karpov, followed by Victor Korchnoi Jan Timman and Mikhail Tal that ended in sixth place, which is impressive because he didn't prepare for the tournament: He came up first as a journalist but then Hubner withdrew before the first round so he decided to compete in the entire tournament.
Then, after the legends had a crack at the puzzle, Tal was so upset that he couldn't solve it that he went for a walk. And then he came up brilliantly with the solution; Below is the puzzle starting position and the solvable version of the puzzle if you want to try and solve it, otherwise, the solution is gonna be posted after explaining the position a little bit and talking about the stockfish case.