Pál Benkö is a Hungarian chess grandmaster, openings theoretician,
author and problemist. He became Hungarian champion when he was 20 and finished
in first place (or tied for first place) in eight US Championships, a record:
1961, 1964 (in that year he also won the Canadian Open Chess Championship),
1965, 1966, 1967, 1969, 1974, 1975. Benko's highest achievements were playing
in the Candidates Tournament with eight of the world's top players in 1959 and
1962. He qualified for the 1970 Interzonal tournament, the leaders of which
advance to the Candidates. However, he gave up his spot in the Interzonal to
Bobby Fischer, who went on to win the World Championship in 1972.
In addition to his success as a player, Benko is a noted authority on the chess
endgame and a composer of endgame studies and chess problems. He is also a dear
friend who keeps in touch with us regularly, sending problems and puzzles for
the ChessBase news page on special occasions – you will find examples
here, here
and here.
For the Easter holidays Pal Benko has sent us the following five puzzles.
Puzzle No. 1
Mate in three moves
Puzzle No. 2
Helpmate in two – A: Diagram, B: Bc1–> Bf1
This problem is known as a twin: first you solve the position as given in the
diagram, then move the white bishop from c1 to f1 and solve it again (as a helpmate
in two moves).
In a helpmate Black moves first and cooperates with White to construct a position
in which Black is mated in the specified number of moves. These are challenging
and very beautiful – after all chess is all about mate, and helpmates
give this ultimate goal of the game its share of attention. In regular chess
mates almost never actually occur. Sometimes at an open or in a blitz game a
grandmaster will actually deliver mate; and many have done so in their early
pre-teen tournaments. But even when they mate, it is usually a very mundane
affair, with a protected queen slamming itself onto a square next to the enemy
king, or one of those perennial back rank affairs. This is natural, because
each side is trying to prevent the other from executing a brilliant checkmate.
All this is a real shame, because the game of chess contains a vast treasure-trove
of extraordinarily beautiful mating motifs. There are thousands and thousands
of checkmate positions which we normal human beings playing in regular chess
tournaments will never see. Solvers of helpmate puzzle on the other hand do
so, and that explains the fascination of this puzzle genre.
Puzzle No. 3
Helpmate in three – two solutions
In helpmates often the author will display two different mates in the same
problem. This would be regarded as a "cook" in regular mates, but
is fully legitimate and considered artistic in this form of puzzle.
Puzzle No. 4
Helpmate in three
Puzzle No. 5
Which World Champion lost bets on all of the above problems – i.e.
he was not able to solve them in a specific period of time (30 minutes for
puzzles 1 + 2), or was not able to solve them at all. Can you do better? Careful,
though, one of the problems contains a very clever subtlety and was constructed
to fool the aforementioned World Champion.
A prize for our readers
In this day and age of computers and problem solving software it is not very
meaningful to offer prizes for the best or quickest solutions to such problems
– unless we perhaps send a memory upgrade to the winner?! So we will draw
a winner by chance from all readers who submit solutions, with one condition:
at least two of them should be correct. It is a prize for participation, and
here's what the lucky winner will get:
It is a historical Fritz 11 program signed by Vishy Anand, Vladimir Kramnik,
Viktor Korchnoi and Pal Benko's compatriot Judit Polgar. Please submit your
solutions and comments until next Sunday (May 1st) using the following feedback
form. The subject must be "Benko challenge" – and
please do not send multiple submissions.
We urge you to try to solve the problems without computer assistance. Pleasurable
as the punching of the Enter key may be, solving Benko's puzzles all by yourself
will bring you far more enjoyment and will not diminish your chances of winning
the prize.
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