Christmas Puzzles: Solutions 4

On the final day of the year we gave you these two very unusual puzzles to solve:

Your task is to place a white king and a white bishop on the board so that White to move can mate in two moves. It was composed by Edward Dunsani and provided by Frank Scarpa, who has given us many entertaining problems on his YouTube channel Chess for Charity. Here's his explanation of the solution to the above example:

There is a second puzzle, by A. Frolkin and A. Kornilov, 1983, was really quite difficult:

Each letter stands for a specific black or white piece type. Reconstruct the position. Here's the solution, very nicely described by Frank.

During the Christmas week we conducted a very interesting experiment. We asked three people to solve these two problems, recording their efforts while they were doing it. The subjects were a chess super-talent, a strong grandmaster who is a problem expert, and an amateur chess player who is a quantum physicist and generally a super-smart person. In the next week we will be showing you how they fared.

Have you enjoyed these puzzles? We hope it will encourage you to venture into the fascinating world of chess composition. Our competition for amateur composers will close on January 15.

Please submit your compositions here

All Christmas 2023 puzzles

• Dec. 25 – Retrospect: Twenty years of ChessBase Christmas Puzzles
• Dec. 26 – Anirudh: In Boden’s Den
• Dec. 27 – Composing chess problems
• Dec. 28 – A Christmassy Delight
• Dec. 29 – Benko improves on Kubbel
• Dec. 30 – Christmas puzzles, fun to solve
• Dec. 31 – Unusual puzzles to end the year!