2/27/2023 – The 44th Finnish Championship in solving took place in the Chess Arena in Helsinki. In the close contest for the top honours, five solvers managed to score more than 50 points. Dutch GM solver Dolf Wissmann missed only 1.5 points and emerged as a deserved winner, ahead of two other GMs, Martynas Limontas of Lithuania and Jorma Paavilainen of Finland, who shared the second place. | Photos: Hannu Harkola
Winning starts with what you know
The new version 18 offers completely new possibilities for chess training and analysis: playing style analysis, search for strategic themes, access to 6 billion Lichess games, player preparation by matching Lichess games, download Chess.com games with built-in API, built-in cloud engine and much more.
Winning starts with what you know The new version 18 offers completely new possibilities for chess training and analysis: playing style analysis, search for strategic themes, access to 6 billion Lichess games, player preparation by matching Lichess games, download Chess.com games with built-in API, built-in cloud engine and much more.
Experts examine the games of Max Euwe. Let them show you which openings Euwe chose to play, where his strength in middlegames were, which tactical abilities he had or how he outplayed his opponents in the endgame.
€34.90
By Marjan Kovačević, WFCC President
The 44th Finnish Championship in solving took place in the Chess Arena in Helsinki. The long-time director of the competition, Neal Turner, carefully selected the 12 problems to be solved within three hours. In solving competitions, the problems should not be just challenging — they must be of good quality, showing interesting and original ideas in an artistically satisfying way.
The chosen problems met all these requirements, so Neal Turner did an excellent job! All 18 participants received points for their solutions and were also able to enjoy the beauty of chess compositions.
Take, for instance, this mutual firework in barely two moves:
Mate in 2 moves
The selection included two problems of each type: 2# (mate in two moves), 3#, more-movers (mate in four or more moves), endgame studies, helpmates and selfmates. The top finishers were close to the maximum of 60 points. For every correct solution, a solver received 5 points, but it was difficult to find all variations in the allotted time.
Those who think a helpmate is easy to solve because Black helps to be mated may try the following problem from the competition in Helsinki:
Helpmate in 2 moves (4 solutions)
Black plays first and cooperates to be mated in the second white move. As usual in helpmates, there are more intended solutions as parts of the overall concept. There is a powerful white battery Qa2-Nc4, suggesting it should be used for the mating move, but it gets paradoxically abandoned each time to create four other batteries.
Most players prefer to attack rather than defend. But what is the correct way to do it? GM Dr Karsten Müller has compiled many rules and motifs to guide you, along with sharpening your intuition for the exceptions.
One of the solutions works this way: 1.Qb4! (Black has to take care of his own checking battery Qc5-Kd5) Rb3! 2.Kxc4 Rc3#. Can you find the other three solutions?
In the close contest for the top honours, five solvers managed to score more than 50 points. Dutch GM solver Dolf Wissmann missed only 1.5 points and emerged as a deserved winner, ahead of two other GMs, Martynas Limontas of Lithuania and Jorma Paavilainen of Finland, who shared the second place. Both netted an equal number of points and used the maximum time, but for the ex-world champion in solving Jorma Paavilainen, that was enough for his 11th national title, bringing him closer to the record holder with 14 Finnish titles, the multiple World Champion Pauli Perkonoja.
Jorma Paavilainen (2nd-3rd), Dolf Wissmann (1st) and Martynas Limontas (2nd-3rd)
Experienced Finnish IM Kari Karhunen, the holder of ten Finnish titles, finished only one point behind this duo, followed by the rising Lithuanian talent Kevinas Kuznecovas. Vidmantas Satkus, in the 6th place, rounded out a great performance by the Lithuanian squad.
The youngest participant, Kevinas Kuznecovas (18), was by far the fastest of all 18 solvers in Helsinki, using only 142 minutes. However, being that fast, he missed 5 out of 10 possible points in two endgames. For the maximum score in the following endgame, the solvers had to find all 13 White’s moves in a surprising King’s corner-to-corner walk!
Is my solution correct? The strong Lithuanian team
The best six solvers significantly rose in the overall standings of the World Solving Cup 2022/23: 1. Martynas Limontas (LTU) 29 points (+10 points), 2. Kevinas Kuznecovas (LTU) 17 (+4), 3. Arno Zude (GER) 16, 4. Dolf Wissmann (NED) 13 (+13), 5. Vidmantas Satkus (LTU) 12 (+2), etc.
The next legs of the WSC 2022/23 will be the open championships of Poland (Sekocin Stary, March 4-5) and the Netherlands (Nunspeet, March 4).
In over 4 hours in front of the camera, Karsten Müller presents to you sensations from the world of endgames - partly reaching far beyond standard techniques and rules of thumb - and rounds off with some cases of with own examples.
How do you play the Queen's Gambit Accepted? Does White have promising variations or can Black construct a water-tight repertoire? The Powerbook provides the answers based on 300 000 games, most of them played by engines.
The Queen's Gambit Accepted Powerbase 2025 is a database and contains a total of 11827 games from Mega 2025 and the Correspondence Database 2024, of which 240 are annotated.
Rossolimo-Moscow Powerbase 2025 is a database and contains a total of 10950 games from Mega 2025 and the Correspondence Database 2024, of which 612 are annotated.
The greater part of the material on which the Rossolimo/Moscow Powerbook 2025 is based comes from the engine room of playchess.com: 263.000 games. This imposing amount is supplemented by some 50 000 games from Mega and from Correspondence Chess.
Focus on the Sicilian: Opening videos on the Najdorf Variation with 6.h3 e5 7.Nb3 (Luis Engel) and the Taimanov Variation with 7.Qf3 (Nico Zwirs). ‘Lucky bag’ with 38 analyses by Anish Giri, Surya Ganguly, Abhijeet Gupta, Yannick Pelletier and many more.
€14.90
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