How much can you learn from a chess study or problem? Not to improve your solving skills, but for your over-the-board tournament play? Many chess players are suspicious, believing that outlandish positions and tricky solutions are of little use to their general skills. But many studies are quite useful and solving them will show you ideas and manoeuvres that will be genuinely useful in your practical play.
This, incidentally, is also true of endgame databases: trying to win a won position against the perfect defence of a computer, or watching it win such a position itself, will involve seeing a lot of preposterous moves. Watch, for instance, the computer force the defending king away from the back rank to win a queen vs rook endgame. But quite often you will encounter moves the like of which you have never seen before. And during a tournament game you may hit upon a situation that requires exactly that kind of move.
But back to studies. Here is a prize-winner we spotted in the July edition of the British magazine CHESS, which we ask you to explore for yourself. Note that the composer is not our dear friend Pal Benko – there is a one-letter difference to the author, who also hails from Hungary.
Pal Benno, 1st Prize , Magyar Sakkvilag 2006
White to play and win
A brief look at the position brings a few key factors to light: Black, who has an overwhelming force, is restricted to moving his queen back and forth between a8 and b8, since any other move will lead to immediate Ra7 mate. But how can White profit from this, and make any progress, enough to actually win?
One idea might occur to you: if the black queen is was on b7, White could check on the sixth rank, forcing the black king to a5, and then attack with the rook from a1 or a2. But of course the white king needs to be out of the way and safe from refuting checks by the black queen. But how to do this? The correct path is convoluted and subtle, but the only way to win.
Well, here's the deal: you, dear readers, are invited to try to solve the above problem by yourselves, ideally first with just a chess board and pieces, then together with a chess engine of your choice. You will find a surprisingly complex manoeuvre is required to execute the above plan, and finding all the subtlties will do absolutely no harm to your general playing strength in over the board chess.
In the original page we had made use of a new JavaScript PGN player that allowed you to solve the Benno study, with machine support, directly in your browser. We had given you just the starting positions and told you how you could move pieces around on the player, just like you do with ChessBase or Fritz. You could also click the "maximize" button on the right below the board to make the player fill your browser window (click it again or press ESC to return to normal size).
All this works in any game we publish. You can click on the little fan symbol in the middle, which will start an engine in your browser, and you can use that to analyse the position while entering moves. Click again to stop the engine.
Below the notation you have additional functions: "PGN" give you the current version of the game or games to store on your local computer, the cloud symbol will store it in your cloud database (assuming you have a ChessBase Account. There are also additional functions to promote, delete or cut lines, and and the edit functions Undo and Redo. All of these are available when you analyze games on the newspage in your browser.
Hopefully you were able to work out the subtle manoeuvres required to solve the Benno study. Here is a full didactic explanation, provided by our premium chess teacher IM Sagar Shah. Note that you can check any lines or ideas on the JavaScript board. "But why not ..." becomes a question you can answer by simply entering the move and watching how the engine reacts.
Why is this problem so difficult to solve?
If you have both these qualities then you are surely on your way to becoming a very strong player. If you weren't able to solve this problem correctly, do not worry. It is only by trying that you can get better. Learn the patterns, store them in your mind. Keep doing this always and one day you will have enough in your arsenal to solve such positions correctly. After all there only 64 squares and 32 pieces on the chess board!
