Daily chess puzzle: Check Mate #469
Another puzzle from Dragoslav Andric’s 1981 book “Matni Udar”.
Black to play and mate White
Unzicker v Dankert, Munich 1979
Solution
As I have mentioned before, one problem with ‘Matni Udar’ is that it doesn’t show which player is to win: the first stage is always to work it out. Here, at first, because I obviously know the name of Unzicker, but didn’t recognise his opponent’s name, I assumed it was ‘White to play and win’. But no: that would be trite, 1 Ne4 winning a pawn and with the better position: so it had to be Black to play and win.
The first move I thought of was 1…Qg3+, an automatic decision as defined by Jacob Aagaard in his recent book, Thinking Inside the Box. And it is also fairly easy to work out that the move wins.
2 Kh1 Qf3! and after 3 gf Nf2+ forks the King and LPDO Qd3, and the Nd3 can’t be trapped, so Black emerges a rook up.
Or 2 Rf3 hg+ 3 Kh1[] Nf2 mate.
FEN
4rrk1/1p3pp1/4p3/pPPpP1q1/3Pn2p/2NQPR1P/6PK/6R1 b – – 0 1