white to mate in 2 moves

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akashbisht

Mygame5377

nice puzzle

Thundercracker

Solved it first time, but it took 5-10 minutes. I noticed, that to solve most of your puzzles that you really have to prioritise blacks possible responses ahead of nice looking moves for white. Basically put him into zugzwang from your first move. To solve this I made the first assumption of the knight not moving, since it was unlikely to lead to mate in two by letting the king move f5 or g4 and then not moving the blocking rook at c1 because it could never deliver mate in two. Then I looked at the only two remaining black moves Ke5 and e5 after checking that Qxe6 or Rxe6 leads to stalemate and the queen at b5 achieves nothing and therefore a nice positional move would be required. First 1...e5 can be met with 2. Qf7#, so this told me the queen would have to remain on its diagonal. Second 1... Ke5 can not lead to mate by any other piece except the queen, the bishop and knight moving would leave more available squares for the king and the rook cannot cover e5 and f4. Therefore the queen would have to go to b8 and checkmate the king along the b8-h2 diagonal and the this meant that the rook must move from d6 on the first move and still cover d4, so 1. Rd7 had to be the best move. I always find zugzwang puzzles to be pretty tricky.