“American Chess Magazine has been launched in November 2016 to help readers keep in touch with all the most significant happenings in the exciting world of present-day chess, both at home and abroad.”
https://acmchess.com/
It is possible you will find below selection easy to solve. In anticipation of that, I am adding one more challenge. Both solutions have something in common. See if you can identify it.
The first puzzle should be easy. It could be the combination of a few pieces and the limited choices making it as such. If it was not that easy for you, replay the solution below to understand it. Afterwards do not forget to look for the odd detail about it.
If you got the odd detail from the solution above, solving the second one could have been a gimmick. However, it was not necessary to get it in order to solve the puzzle. You could still solve it on its own. Here you can have a look at below solution and see what detail matches the one used above.
Being a fan of board games in general could help figuring out the common detail between the two solutions. My father was a big fan of two others beside chess. They were draughts and Go. His interest in draughts came from being a subscriber to the Soviet chess magazine 64, where draughts got a lot of coverage. That included the international competitions and the World Championship matches.
Go is something one of my uncles played competitively. My brother and I also studied it and played to a higher level than amateurs normally do. There weren’t opportunities to play it competitive locally; still we enjoyed it nevertheless. Go is a 2,500-year-old deeply strategic game that proved to be the most challenging one for computers to master. It took until 2016 when the computer program AlphaGo beat the World top Go player Lee Sedol 4-1 in a historical match.
What I find fascinating about Go is how true its proverbs are. They have been gems of wisdom discovered and passed with care from one generation to another. Here are three of them I selected in purpose:
- “Greediness is not victorious”
- “Against strong positions, play safe”
- “Play on the point of symmetry”
Don’t you think they can be applied in chess as well? Read in particular the third one. Now look again at both solutions above and see how it applies in both cases. That is the answer I was looking for. I will end this with a fun fact you probably did not know about: Go is the second most played game in the World behind Xiangqi (Chinese chess).
Eugen Demian
