Tactics Time: Can You Outsolve Some Legends?
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.
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.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Djaja 1972: Solution Time
- Tactics Time: Can You Outsolve Some Legends?
Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on
Wednesday August 5, 2009 at 2:55am
[DM: Too much information.]