Nova Daily - 11 April 2026: A few things to share in a busy weekend
Hi!
Because the weekend is crammed, I'll just share a few tiny things that I'm happy and willing to share here. One exercise, one game, one thought, and one cool song. Maybe two cool songs.
I solved this puzzle in 14 seconds. This is how.
The first thing that comes to mind is to take b3 and make a run for it. However, white will then push c5, take c6, play Kb7, and get the pawn to c7 with the own king ready to effect the typical stalemate trap of standing in the corner so that black can't take on c7. So if I play c5 first, the king will be further away from the corner, and that should give me just enough room to play Qa8.Verifying this: for black (who is to start), Kxb3 and promoting the pawn takes up 5 moves.
Those same moves for white would be Kxp, K-b, and pushing the c-pawn to c7. Having to capture on c5, the closest to the corner that the king can get is b5 because the king has to keep in touch with the own pawn. That also accounts for Kd5. After black promotes, the pawn can get to c7, and then black can play Qa8 and Qc8 to hinder the pawn from promoting.
Below is another game that I played against an IM that I didn't necessarily have to lose but botched.
While I didn't remember how exactly this game went until I looked it up again, this game means something to me. It was played around the time that I started drawing titled players for the first time. And it brought me to high alert that my good result in those earlier games wasn't just a fluke. Since I was clearly capable of achieving favourable positions against these titled players, with more work on my game it would be able for me to evolve my chess past the level of just having those results every now and then. There should come a time that I start winning these games.
Given the games I've lost in recent times, only a few of them were straightforward losses directly resulting from mistreating the opening. Given Wei Yi's mishap against Caruana in round 3 of the Candidates, that still happens even at 2750 level, so I have every reason in the world to be mild for myself if this happens.
The game above was one of the things that kickstarted my ambition after years of sitting at the same rating and being complacent with it. I've mentioned before that it was a conversation with a WGM that opened my eyes. She said to me: "Your problem is that you can stand losing so well that it holds you back." That, coupled with unfavourable results that I knew could and should have been more, has been the start of my journey that I started chronicling about a year and a half ago.
