Chess.com's Weekly Study: May 29th 2016

Hello Chess.com!

Starting with 2016, we will be posting a Weekly Study, courtesy of Yochanan Afek, Grandmaster for composing endgame studies. These challenging positions are designed to stimulate (and improve upon!) your creativity, depth of calculation, pattern recognition and pure imagination.

Y. Afek, 2007

Enjoy!

Good stuff.

Ooo! Danny approval! That's got to be a good sign! I'll take a deep look at this later. Looks interesting already

Another excellent composition from Yochanan Afek.  The theme is relatively straight forward, namely that White has to wrong foot the knight.  I must admit I missed White's beautiful 4th move the first time through.  It's hard to believe that the only way Black can stop White is from h4.  I need to re-read Knight Moves by Charles Alexander.

A nice entry in the XIX Z. Birnov Memorial Tourney, results published in 2008 in the newspapaper Molodoj (Volgograd, Russia).

These puzzles are great. More people need to know about them!

Fuggedaboutit!  Those who are aesthetically inclined will come to endgame studies naturally; for the rest it's like throwing pearls before swine.  We don't need these threads to be peppered with FP and other nonsense.  Let the self-involved freebies draw mustaches on the Mona Lisa in the Daily Puzzles thread.

Actually, these shouldn't be called puzzles at all; they should be separated out the way ChessCafe did it into simply Endgames Studies.  That way you don't get riffraff passing through causing trouble.

With apologies to Norma Desmond and her corner of Sunset Boulevard, "Alright Mr. D. Rensch, We're ready for our close-up (examination of the next endgame study)."

These endgame studies must be an afterthought to Chess.com staff.  It has been two weeks and nothing.