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(Somewhat) Intriguing Positions Edition 1

smith8800
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This series was formerly known as "Hopelessly Pinned Pieces", but since then, I have decided that instead of creating multiple series of posts for different positions, I have just combined my ideas. More such (somewhat) interesting disgrams are to follow, but for now...

Do you ever find lots of your pieces helplessly pinned? I do (I also find then trapped a lot, especially bishops, but that's for another time).

If you've ever read the Chess World Records Wikipedia article (there may be a couple of inaccuracies, but the article can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_records_in_chess), you may have seen the section on "largest number of helplessly pinned pieces", which features this diagram:

(Note: white's king is misplaced; it belongs on c1, and I forgot to move it there, but I decided not to spend time fixing it since it isn't really a big deal.)

If you want to know who the players were, visit the page yourself, but as you can tell, black's bishop, knight, and rook are all pinned to the black king and thus prevented from capturing the white knight that is deliverinig mate.

Sad, right? I'm not sure I would call this "largest number of pinned pieces", but it is more than hopeless/helpless, so I'll let you gawk at it (have fun!).

I have endured some horrifying pins myself (and have administered some along the way), so I may dig up a couple of those diagrams and post them later.