Puzzle theme: Passed pawns

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oagersnap

This is not really an important issue but more of a mild annoyance. When I solve puzzles, I notice that the theme "passed pawns" comes up disproportionally often. It's very rare that the puzzle actually has anything to do with passed pawns - in most cases, there will be a passed pawn somewhere on the board, but it isn't moved or otherwise important for the puzzle. See below for an example: Technically, black's d-pawn is a passed pawn even though it has never moved, but it's completely irrelevant for the puzzle - the solution here is simply ...Qxg3#. Has anyone else noticed this? Why does it only happen for this one particular theme?

 

Martin_Stahl
oagersnap wrote:

This is not really an important issue but more of a mild annoyance. When I solve puzzles, I notice that the theme "passed pawns" comes up disproportionally often. It's very rare that the puzzle actually has anything to do with passed pawns - in most cases, there will be a passed pawn somewhere on the board, but it isn't moved or otherwise important for the puzzle. See below for an example: Technically, black's d-pawn is a passed pawn even though it has never moved, but it's completely irrelevant for the puzzle - the solution here is simply ...Qxg3#. Has anyone else noticed this? Why does it only happen for this one particular theme?

 

 

 

When the themes were first implemented, they were mostly crowdsourced and a lot of junk data got in there.

There's supposed to be work going towards fixing some of that:

https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/problem-with-themes-of-puzzles?comment=64756327#comment-64756327