Question about Polgar's 5334 Problems

As a new owner of the "Polgar Brick" I just noticed that the solution to the "mate in 2" problems is always only a single move.

Why is that?
Is the second move considered so trivial that it doesn't need to be mentioned?

It's not trivial but it shortens the book and it's a teaching mechanism.

If you know the key move here is Kc4, you imagining black's possible responses will help you understand the tactic.

You need to have calculated ALL of the possible replies to your move, to know that you have checkmate. He might move to this square, checkmate follows with move x. He might block with a piece, then checkmate happens with move y. You move this piece to deliver check, it opens another avenue of escape, and there is no checkmate, so that piece can’t move. This rook blocks that file, it can’t move, etc etc. it’s a great book for honing calculation, some of those mates in 2 are super hard, but they give you a solid sense of how to use pieces in a mating net. Don’t forget the basic endgames section- hit those hard too! They give the longer solutions to those. Enjoy!

it's amazing how tricky some of the mate in 2 puzzles are, especially with the king in the open and 2 knights, the amount of possible variations to calculate is tough, which is why this is such a good book.

Thank you all for your answers

Quite frankly, even some of the first 50 or so mate-in-1 problems were surprisingly tricky.
I guess I'll learn a lot from this book <3

Wait until you do the puzzels here...I'm at a point that I can see a mate in 5 or 6 moves but the right answer is to settle with gaining a piece in two. It seems like I have to think very simple to solve how they want it.

I've done a few puzzles here, and I too sometimes find it difficult to see what each puzzle wants me to do.

I mean, depending on what my goal is, there could be more than one good move...

Please provide an example of such a puzzle where you have a forced mate but the puzzle wants you to settle for winning a piece..

 

Sure, I'm allowed to do 3 puzzles a day next time I got one again I'll capture it.

You never had a puzzle here where the opponent is in bad position where every move is basically a winning one? Instead of pressing further the puzzle turns out choosing the easy way out by exchanging pieces to have an endgame with one piece more?

I agree with @JustBeFair: I have done 11,000+ puzzles, and yes, sometimes I see a mate in 4 or 5 or 6 and miss the puzzle because it wants to win a piece. But when I analyze the position, I find out that the mate I saw was not possible due to piece placement, in general, and that the best I could really do was to win a piece

Well going to an endgame by exchanging pieces to come out with one piece more is a sure way to win but I'm pretty sure by pressing more would result in either mate or gaining more pieces. As you can see in my history of puzzles I've going down a lot in points lately by not choosing the easy way out.

I have the hard cover, that thing is full of cooks and inacuracies. If you are looking at some of the problems there and thinking there is something wrong with them then you are improving your chess playing visual skills. Now the real challenge is figuring out the errors on your own sans computer program.

i use it to train calculations and visualisation, and not winning moves