The world famous chess periodical Sahovski Informator, founded in 1966 by GM Alexander Matanovic who headed a group of strong and enthusiastic players, celebrated its 50th anniversary by organizing an International composing tourney for endgame studies. Privileged to act as its judge I received 36 anonymous entries from the tourney director Gady Costeff, to whom I am grateful for his invaluable assistance in checking the candidate entries for soundness and originality.
The general standard of the field was very good. I gave some priority to players' friendly entries i.e. those with “digestible” settings as well as comprehensive ideas and solutions. Most of the entries luckily did match these unwritten requests. Personally I am not particularly fond of artificial efforts to stretch a sufficiently lengthy solution by either multiple piece exchanges (in this case on the very same square) or unnecessary BTM stipulation.
Two of the more serious candidates suffering from these flaws I decided to allow a second chance in another tourney instead of ranking them low. Two other entries improved on prize-winners from previous major events which I had judged. I hesitated before deciding to award each of them a deserved special honourable mention.
Here is my top ranking. You know that you can move the pieces on the board to analyse the positions. So why not try to solve them before looking at the solutions at the end.
All three white pieces are sacrificed in the course of a fierce struggle to keep the seventh rank closed in order to secure promotion.
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A very attractive logical miniature displaying an original reciprocal zugzwang.
A surprising capture refusal allows the single tempo required for dominating the black knight. A pleasant discovery!
A fine improvement on H. van der Heijden, 4th Prize Olympic tourney Dresden 2008 in which I acted as the judge. Here we witness two additional logical tries, significantly upgrading the original version which should naturally be regarded as a partial anticipation.
Another significant improvement on an earlier study by L. Tarasiuk, 4th prize, FIDE Cup 2015, in which I acted as the judge.
The final pin stalemate is not new (Kasparyan, 1st Pr. Revista Romana de Sah 1938); however the tactical play leading to it is well constructed.
Two Black Q+ B batteries, unleashed against the white monarch, are unable to tame the advanced pawn owing to white's accurate play.
