Cordingley puzzle 159 #chess

White to play and win

Solution

Oh dear, another cooked puzzle.

I was intrigued by this one: the position looks like a very standard Ruy Lopez, with still lots to play for. But since it was a puzzle, I thought I must be missing something. The Be7 is LPDO, and the Qc7 and Be7 are 'potassium cyanide' to the d5 pawn (see my previous blogs on Purdy), but I couldn't make anything on these, nor the somewhat looseness of the Ra7/Na5. So, it had to be the weakness created by h6, so I tried Bh6, couldn't make it work, and so set the pieces out on the board.

A bit of moving the pieces around confirmed that 1 Bh6 is no good: so, the move I would want to play, was 1 Nh4, and if 1…Nd5, then 2 Nhf5 and hope…but 1…Rfa8 or other solid moves mean there is plenty of play. I then turned to the solution and saw that black played the fairly weak 1…Nd5 and that Cordingley notes that Ra8 was better.

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