Weekly Puzzles

Weekly puzzles will be posted here!!!!

Try to solve and comment on this forum - good luck!!!

Puzzle 1

Easy to start - Black to play and mate in 3 - Good Luck

Qxh6.  White can then do anything - say Rxe1 or more likely Qxd6 to attack my pawn in vein hope black does not achieve mate!!   then Qxh1 for mate

When you say "mate in 3 " does this usually mean 3 black moves or the combined number?

3 Black moves starts with a check!!

Answer was Rh1+ King is forced to capture Rook then Qh6+ (importantly with Check here - forcing move) then Qh2#

Puzzle 2

Black to move Checkmate in 6 - all moves are checks!!

Got checkmate in 6 moves starting Rxd4 taking knight. Qxd2, Kxc4, Rxc8, Kxb4, Qb2, Ka5, Qxa3, Kxa6 (takes pawn), Rxa1 for checkmate

I tried several alternative moves for the King - eg moving to e4 instead of c4 leads to checkmate in 4 moves!     Not confident I haven't missed a better King move at some point but found the game hard to follow without being able to actually move the pieces!   Is it possible to move the board to a location where I could play the various options?  Took lots of notes to record moves but still hard to visualise where the pieces are after about 3 moves!  (Could have used my chess set of course)

Your first move Rxd4+ is correct!! King must get out of check so cxd4 is reply didn't understand your Qxd2.

King did move to xd4.!   I just forgot to include that move in my report!  Is there a way of copying the chessboard puzzle into a place I can play with the pieces? Or is it necessary, or easiest,  to set up my chess board

I will post the position code under the puzzle in future you can just paste that into a chess program and play from that position. Thanks for that Noel I'm sure others will find that helpful too.

Many thanks