14 March 2022

Jazz

...no two notes the same and no one note off the chord, the more they relax in the excitement of it the more a natural genius in preselection becomes evident and the more indeed the melodic line becomes rigorously pure.
Otis Ferguson, "The Spirit of Jazz" The New Republic (December 1936)
It seems that I spent twenty minutes staring at the first of these problems before I gave up and peeked at the answer. The second took longer than I am willing to admit, but I found the correct first move only to miss the second and left it unsolved until I looked in the back of the book. But then, I solved quickly the last two and began to appreciate the music of the whole set.

These are exercises 1606-1609 in Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games by László Polgár (325-326). See "The Polgar Brick: eBook Edition" for a review. They were composed in 1968 by Attila Benedek and can also be found in the composer's book Chess Problems, trans. David Durham (2007).

White to move. Mate in two.












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