Another puzzle for an easy main chess puzzle day

Black to play and win

Bakhar v Gleizerov, Chalkidiki 1992

Solution

This took me a while, even though I saw the initial move on inspection. I missed one key aspect in my calculation, and this then took me round the houses. So this puzzle is either easy or hard.

The main idea is clearly how to exploit the four rooks being aligned on e file, and some knight involvement is necessary. Also, the Qc2 and Bf4 are LPDO, and we can probably rule out 1..g5 as the solution, though one minor point is that if the bishop then retreated to h2, there might be a back rank mate motif.

So, back to the move I first thought of: 1…Nc3! 2 Re6[] Re6 3 Re6[] and now because the Nc3 is protected by the Pb4 (the point I had missed in my mind's eye, until I refocused) 3…Nd4! and it is game over. The white queen is, perhaps surprisingly, lost, with Qc1 losing to Ne2+.

Nice.

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