Deductive Puzzle #18

Seeing as there are two light colored White Bishops on the board, there have been some promotions going on. Where is the original King's Bishop at?

the original kings bishop was captured on f1?

At first glance, this is difficult because there are so few pieces left on the board.

Let's get to what we know.

• White to move is in check. This , combined with the rest of the position, means that black's last move must have been fxg3 e.p.+. This means that white's previous move must have been g2-g4, blocking check. This in turn means that black's previous move was f5-f4+.
• I think that nearly any move was possible before this.
• The only other things I think we really know are that the b and e pawns never moved.

So I'm about stuck, but I'm guessing by the wording of the question that the original bishop is off the board, having been captured...

Oh wait, of course, since white's last move was g2-g4, the original king's bishop could never have escaped, so it was captured on f1 and is now off the board. Good call, fiver!

Both White Bishops are promoted pawns.  Nice work guys.

oh...first time I get one without reading the posts underneath...and the problem was already solved...

Anyway good work guys!

Well, I guess no one has truly answered the question with any specificity. Maybe derUbermensch is looking for a more specific answer than "off the board." Maybe we are supposed to guess where exactly the original king's bishop is at? In fact, if this is an OTB game, the original king's bishop could still be on the board as it may have been used to replace one of the promoted pawns. Well, any guesses?

well the two promoted pawns were the a and c

Without the letters and numbers on the board, everyone is assuming we are looking at the board from White's perspective. What if it is Black's perspective? Does that make it impossible to solve? This looks frighteningly similar to a problem in an old chess book that actually did the board flip thing on us.

If the board is flipped there's not way to have arrived in the current position without one of the two sides having moved into check in one of the last few moves.

Not necessarily. They could have been other pawns that moved onto any light-squared file by capturing.