With a little help from my friends

[Note that Jon Speelman also looks at the content of the article in video format, here embedded at the end of the article.]

I thought that this time I’d look at some miscellaneous action from last month, starting with a study which I composed a few weeks ago apropos of a game I was watching online.

Please have a look at it if you like, or if you prefer, you can see the solution in the games file.

Study composition is one of the aspects of chess that has been both most helped and most muddied by computers. Sometimes it turns out that a study is actually unsound or at least has dual(s), and sometimes for example there are complications regarding the 50-move rule. But if you have an idea, then it has never been easier to test it, so that a process that would once have taken days or at least many hours can now be finalised in mere minutes.

The idea for this study came from a queen ending in Sharjah, which I was watching:

Obviously a strong grandmaster is not going to play 75...c2?? in a million years, but it set me thinking about possible mating patterns with queen and pawn v. queen, and my musings led me to the end of the study above.

Having got your final position you work backwards, and it’s not too hard to imagine that Black will just have played QxN on c4 before the final series of checks. You then have to place the white queen on the board, presumably on the long diagonal, and the knight so that it can go to c4, and after some false starts — I can't remember exactly, but I think that I tried with the knight on d6 which allowed ...Qb6+ at a bad moment. I put it on e3, checked the tablebase and was told that Nc4 was the only move. Then it was a question of going back a little bit further and I realised that the knight had to block the g-file en route to e3 so in fact in the initial position it could also start on g2.

I then wondered how to get the king to c1 and was gratified when Bb2-c1 worked once the king was on b1. Why can’t White just play Qg1 mate when the king is on c1? Well, the black knight stops that. So after less than an hour I had a possible starting position and somewhat to my surprise the engine (this is an eight-piece position so you can’t yet use a tablebase) told me that it was sound.

I normally ring John Nunn on his birthday which is April 25^th (Tony Miles was April 23^rd), but for some reason thought that he was away and tried a couple of weeks later when he was actually in Slovenia at the European Senior Team Championships (where the three England teams — over 50, over 65 and women’s over 50 — all won golds). We had a quick chat and agreed to talk longer once he was home. In the interim, I’d composed this glorious study and I sent it to him asking whether, as I strongly suspected, it was anticipated.

When John opened the email, it took him less than two minutes to solve, and he then did find a total anticipation. I had only searched for the final position as I had it and neglected to reflect the board about the centre line between the d and the e-files...

Again, please have a go at solving it if you like. As you’ll see, the final position is identical modulo the reflection.

I was very slightly disappointed that there was such a total anticipation, but it would have been extraordinary had somebody not done this one before, and I was delighted that it in fact won a first prize.

At the end of our conversation, John told me about his last-round game in Slovenia. It’s a real throwback to his prime when he was an utterly ferocious 1.e4 player, and I'm sure that you will enjoy it.

I’ll be back on July 7^th.

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Links

• Previous column: The search for less than perfection (or when -0.07 > 0.11)
• All Speelman’s Agony columns