Cordingley puzzle 166 #chess
White to play and win
(One worth spending time on: a lot to see)
Solution
I thoroughly enjoyed this one. To me, it was a choice between 1 Qd5 and 1 Nf7. For a while, I couldn't get either to work; I dillied and dallied (no Kotovian tree of analysis here, no Soviet GM rigour of looking at each line once and only once).
Eventually I settled on trying to make 1 Nf7 work, mainly because the best defence I could see, Bb4 and Ne7, looked so ungainly. When I envisioned Re7 in that line, I 'knew' I was past the summit in terms of solving, and the rest was checking, making sure there were no nasties lurking.
Afterwards, looking at it with Houdini, further depths were found. In addition, since this game was Chigorin playing the Chigorin, I then had a look at the earlier moves of the game, and some additional comments are included in the attached PDF.
This is one of my favourite puzzles so far. Quite challenging, but surmountable.
One further thing to note is that white had many strong moves in the initial position. After a few minute's or thought, here are Houdini's analyses:
The PDF below has more on this game.
Posted with Blogsy
allanbeardsworth 