Test your chess: daily chess puzzle

White to play and win

Lev Aronian- Ruslan Ponomariov, Bilbao 15/9/14

Seen in Malcolm Pein's Daily Telegraph column. A difficult one, see below for Malcolm's hint (which didn't help me to solve it, I still struggled).

Hint

Malcolm gave a hint 'think what would you play if black were to play Kh3”.

Solution

A real challenge for me. The hint didn't help. I knew black's king had to be in a mating net if white were to win, but what to play?

Eventually I returned to CJS Purdy's basics.

One net: black's king is somewhat short of space;

Three ties: the queen is tied to defending the Bc7 and Ph6; and the Bc7 tied to watching the b8 promotion square;

Two LPDOs: the pawns on a5 and f5. (LPDOs being John Nunn, not Cecil Purdy)

Examine all biffs: and this gave the solution: 1 Be6! when there we several variations to calculate, but as soon as I saw the move (which took me a long while) I intuitively knew I had solved the positon. Very nice.

For the full game, with some annotations, see the Chessbase article here.

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