World Solving Championship solutions (1)

Solutions, Dresden, 2017 — Part 1

By John Nunn

The 41st World Chess Solving Championship took place during the second week in August in Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony. The solving event has been running since 1977 and is a well-established part of the annual World Congress of Chess Competition. Recently it has been utterly dominated by Poland, who have won every year since 2009. We reported on this year’s event two weeks ago. Today we bring you the solutions to the first four problems given there.

The Championship began with an Open event, which was won by Piotr Murdzia; I came second and Vladimir Podinic third. The image at the top of this report shows the winners (Nunn, Murdzia, Podinic). Here is an attractive study from the Open event.

The next day we were on to the serious business, the World Championship itself, which lasts a total of two days, with three rounds each day. The very first round consists of three mates in two, which have to be solved in 20 minutes. Although Axel Steinbrink, who set the problems, chose a rather sneaky one to start with, the leading solvers coped with this and all scored 100%. Here is the most attractive of the three.

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The second round of mates in three proved more troublesome, and a number of solvers, myself included, dropped points through missing variations. In problem-solving events you have to give complete solutions, including all variations, in order to score full marks on a problem. It’s quite easy to overlook a relatively minor line and drop a point or two. The following problem from this round should appeal to over-the-board players.

The third round of endgame studies generally causes quite a few problems, especially for problemists who are not always strong over-the-board players. At one time I could count on gaining a lot of ground in the study round, but these days most of the leading solvers are also good OTB players (there were several over-the-board IMs and GMs competing at Dresden) so this advantage has more or less disappeared. Here’s an endgame study from this round which features a common over-the-board tactical idea, but in a very unusual setting.

Full solutions to the remaining four problems with explanations will be provided by the author in a separate article, shortly.

You can also download a PGN of the selected problems without solutions but with pointers by John Nunn to help you solve them, e.g. with ChessBase or a Fritz-compatible program.

John Nunn is a director of Gambit Publications, a leading chess book publisher. They have some interesting new books out this year.

In his day, Lajos Portisch was known for his meticulous opening preparation and in this book he opens his files and shows how key ideas in the Ruy Lopez have evolved from the 1960s to the current era. See GambitBooks.com for more information.

Yochanan Afek, a Grandmaster of Composition and an over-the-board International Master, explores the world of extreme chess tactics, using a host of entertaining examples from over-the-board play and the world of endgame studies. See this page for more information.

These two Gambit books are available in print, Kindle and app form. Using the app, which is available for iOS and Android devices, you can play over all the moves on-screen.