I solved this puzzle on
Chess.com in 38 seconds. There were several surprises: first I gained 16 for solving it. That made me curious. It is rated 3080, only 38% of those who have attempted it get it right, and the average time is 1:44. There have been 1042 attempts. It is
Puzzle 1412696, if you would like to try it on the site.
I also posted it on Facebook, where more people are getting it wrong than are getting it correct. Many claim it is easy, but do not post their solution. Follow-up questions with some of them reveals that they also failed.
Black to move
 |
| Black is on bottom |
I tried what I thought was the obvious move first, switch to move that preserved the Rook control of the open d-file, and then back to my original when I realised the requirement was to stop the king moving to c6 right at the start. A good problem, it reminded me of this one from chesstempo [https://chesstempo.com/chess-problems/150072780 ] , which has a similar knight function ( at least in my mind :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment. The discussion on Facebook has been interesting not only in how many people miss it, but in the variety of ways--wrong knight move, wrong rook move (both the wrong rook and the right rook to the wrong square), miscalculating Black's replies although there are few.
Delete