Level 5

It is not easy to judge the difficulty level of a chess exercise. In a correspondence game fifteen years ago, I spent a full two hours or more finding the only non-losing move where there were multiple checkmate threats. Last October, I showed it to a friend at the Spokane Chess Club and he solved it in a few seconds.

Black to move

In Tactical Training (2021), Cyrus Lakdawala rates exercises on a scale of 1 to 5. He offers the suggestion that a mate in one illustrating the Dove Tail Mate should be classified as 0.5 because it is so easy (23). Nonetheless, several of my online students struggled with similar exercises in December (23). He states, "Level 3 is a problem that an 1800-rated player should solve without breaking too much of a sweat" (8), but I struggled with a couple of those this morning. "Levels 4.5 to 5 means that even a 2400-rated player may sweat to solve it" (9), but I solved one without much difficulty while eating breakfast this morning.

The Level 5 exercise that I solved this morning is the conclusion of a study by Vassily Smyslov published in New in Chess Magazine in 2000. I found the full study in Harold van der Heijden's Endgame Study Database.

It is number 132 in Tactical Training (114). Maybe you will do as well as I did.

White to move

I reviewed Tactical Training for Amazon last July.