3 minutes! Purely logical puzzle. Many of the moremovers are much easier than 3-movers or 4-movers but solving them is highly satisfactory! The most thematic defense is 5. ... Rb8 which forces 6. Rc6#. The rook vists all free squares on the 6th rank!
Mate in six(837)
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I wonder if this is not a better version. It thematically visits 7 squares on the 6th rank, one more than the original! The only disadvantage is that white has no mate against the black check threat 1 ... Rxa7+ but I am not sure that counts as fatal in a long moremover.
Arisktotle wrote:
3 minutes! Purely logical puzzle. Many of the moremovers are much easier than 3-movers or 4-movers but solving them is highly satisfactory! The most thematic defense is 5. ... Rb8 which forces 6. Rc6#. The rook vists all free squares on the 6th rank!
yes I know, I thought the 5 defense was kind of obvious to the theme and wanted to show the alternative move.Thought it might be a temporary unexpected surprise.
I saw the solution backwards
Arisktotle wrote:
I wonder if this is not a better version. It thematically visits 7 squares on the 6th rank, one more than the original! The only disadvantage is that white has no mate against the black check threat 1 ... Rxa7+ but I am not sure that counts as fatal in a long moremover.
In a direct mate don't black have to prolong mate as much as possible,1......Rxa7+ shortens the mate to 5 moves doesn't it ? Which makes your version a very good one.
sameez1 wrote:
In a direct mate don't black have to prolong mate as much as possible,1......Rxa7+ shortens the mate to 5 moves doesn't it ? Which makes your version a very good one.
That's true but not what I meant. It's mate in 5 after the key move but not before it! Compare it to the twomovers which were declared 'flawed' because - if black was to start - he could check white without being checkmated on the next move. It's called an "unprovided" or "open" check. To provide for the ...Rxa7+ threat in my diagram, white should be able to checkmate black in 6 moves following it.
I think this is less of an issue in long moremovers since they are more like endgame studies where these conditions don't count. You can even start with check without the slightest penalty. However, it is hard to believe that the author did not see my version so I assume he rejected it because of the unprovided check.
I don't see the reasoning for the open check rule,obviously I really did not know what it was until now.Do you agree with that rule?Just curious.
The point of the open check "rule" - it's more of a convention and it's not absolute - is that it is easier to find a key move when you know that black threatens a check move. Whatever you play, you must disarm the check as well. That is also true on the composer side. You like to show a particular key move but you can't get your composition sound. What you could do is give black an opportunity to check white which is only refutable by your intended key move. It is a similar frailty to "taking away a flight square on the key" which is another method to make composing and solving significantly easier.
Having said that, I once won a prize with a 3-mover that violated the flight square convention. Also, these violations are much worse on short direct mates where the key move is a large portion of the solution, whereas in the longer problems the key move may be less significant in the total picture. For instance, in the problem at hand, the thematic tries of misplacing the rook are on every solution move and not just on the key move! On the key move, white has 2 thematic tries - 1.Rg7 and 1.Re7 - both of which are not refutable by ... Rxa7+. Knowing that you must disarm the check threat does not help here in deciding between 3 key move candidates! My opinion is therefore that the "open" check is a minor flaw in this particular problem. Sometimes a 1st move is as insignificant as the first meters of a marathon. Nobody cares how fast they start. But how different is that in a 100 meter run!
White in six by H. Lepuschutz ,
1936