The Chess Mind

In this post, I presented the following position, taken from a ChessBase article:


D. Djaja 1972; White to move and draw

The story was that this position had stumped many strong GMs, both back around the time of its composition and more recently, at the Mainz festival a few weeks ago - and this despite at least some of them spending half an hour on it.

I had intended to leave the solution to the ChessBase people, but as they haven't gotten around to it in a couple of weeks, I'll go ahead and supply the answer. Click below.

Here's a position from one D. Djaja, composed in 1972; it's White to move and draw:



According to GM Jan Hein Donner in The King, neither he nor Paul Keres and some other notables managed to solve it despite trying for more than half an hour (this was many years ago), and apparently no one who saw this at Mainz (which just ended) did any better.

Patzers! I looked at it for around 10 minutes - no chess engine running - and solved it. Before you confer the title of solving legend on me (or the more dubious title of "colossal underachiever"), a confession is in order: almost as soon as I solved it, I remembered having seen this problem before, or else one with a similar drawing motif. It didn't pop into my mind before I had the "aha" moment, but that doesn't mean that somewhere, subconsciously, my "homunculus" wasn't in some sense aware of it. At any rate, it's a nice problem, and if you can solve it without moving pieces or using an engine and without having seen it or anything like it before, you certainly deserve a pat on the back.

HT: ChessBase.com, which will present the solution in a little less than a week. I won't steal their thunder by presenting it here or in a follow-up post, so those of you who don't solve it or who lack engines will just have to wait.