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.
At the same Congress where the idea for this column was conceived, a number of composing tourneys were held. I participated in several of them, but unfortunately because of a misunderstanding my entry for a two-mover tourney was at first not submitted and then didn’t fit the theme. In the studies tourney, I got more lucky – I did not win anything, but I had the pleasure of seeing a very beautiful study which I would love to share, here in a corrected version.
|
|
Darko won a bottle of Jenever, the traditional prize for this annual tourney organized by the Alexander Rueb Union for Chess Endgame Studies (Dutch abbreviation: ARVES). Their website offers a lot of studies for the readers to watch, but some pages take – at least for me – very long to load. The complete award of the tourney, as well as another endgame study and some other composition tourneys can be found at the WCCC 2016 website. The theme here was a smothered mate that is executed by a promoted knight.
Of course the theme of the smothered mate is old, reaching back at least to the beginnings of modern chess. As studies with a lot of analysis are boring to some readers, the following study (actually a direct mate, but also sound as a study), featuring some knights as well, will not need any analysis at all, and it also contains an idea that dates back to the beginnings of modern... shatranj.
Darko Hlebec (born 1984) is a Serbian endgame study composer talent and personal friend of your author, who met him first in person in 2013. Darko works as director of his private company when he isn’t composing.
H. F. L. Meyer (complete name: Heinrich Friedrich Ludwig Meyer, 1839-1928) was a German chess composer whose works belong to the classical heritage of chess composition. Sadly not much is known about him apart from chess.
Ottó Titusz Bláthy (1860-1939) was the engineer of many chess puzzles that work more like clockwork than like chess games. The above modification of a Meyer idea is one of his shorter (!) studies. As we can read in various Internet sources, not only in chess, but also in his inventions this engineering genius created never-seen-before machines, such as the modern electric transformer (with Miksa Déri and Károly Zipernowsky).
 |
About the authorSiegfried Hornecker (*1986) is a German chess composer and member of the World Federation for Chess Composition, subcommitee for endgame studies. His autobiographical book "Weltenfern" (in English only) can be found on the ARVES website. He will present an interesting endgame study with detailed explanation each month. |
