Cordingley puzzle 58

White to play and win

Solution

Oh dear: another puzzle which could be 'find a plausible move for white which doesn't win'.

Here's how I addressed the problem. Firstly, my immediate thought was 1 Re7+ Qe7 2 Bg6+, and this turns out to be Houdini's first preference. It is the way I would almost certainly- in fact certainly- play in practice. It is clear enough: at the end, the white queen dominates, and e.g. mops up the b7 pawn.

Secondly, I looked at 1 Bg6+ Kg6 2 Re7. I thought this was likely to be good enough, but wasn't sure (Houdini tells me it was): in practice, there was too much to calculate, with confidence, and I would be frightened of missing the one saving line.

Finally, I looked for something more imaginative. Drawing an idea from puzzle 43, Eliskases-Stahlberg, which I had painfully fluffed, and where the key is the change in diagonal of a white squares bishop (from d3, I fact from hitting g6) to another diagonal (there h1-a8, hitting d5) I came up with the move played in the game, 1 Ne4, the idea being to reroute the bishop to c4, if the N is captured: and if not, the Nc3 enters the party. I spent some time on 1…g5, thought it should win, and decided it was the same more or less as 1 Re7. Because it is a puzzle book, I plumped for 1 Ne4, though as said, in practice I would have played more simply.

Posted with Blogsy