Tying up some loose ends

Today I’m going to post some solutions and oddments as a means of bringing a few discussions to a close.

First of all, my “Bent Double” puzzle which I set for you to ponder when I posted my tribute to the Great Dane a couple of weeks ago. The solution is given below:

Congratulations to Fruitcake who claimed the proffered prize (a pint of his choosing at our beloved home venue, The Trades Club) on Monday night. The solution really is quite marvellous. It is quite hard to find simply because it doesn’t really fit with any standard mating patterns. Usually chess puzzles (especially mating solutions) can be solved by looking for well known and frequently recurring patterns and themes amongst the pieces in the starting position. Well done Fruitcake!

Now onto more serious matters… A couple of weeks ago I demonstrated that the final position of the final game in the final round of the Hebden Bridge Chess Club Lightening Competition contained hidden depths. The game between father and son Dave Wedge and Matthew Wedge-Roberts was adjudicated to be a win for white (Dave) and no one in the room could have argued with that for he was an exchange up in an apparently straightforward end game.

However, on closer inspection it turned out that the position was not at all easy to win for white. Indeed, I casually played out the game against my computer and found it to be quite tough. Therefore I asked readers of this blog to contribute solutions. I’m happy to say that the main protagonist himself has come forward with a methodology for white to win. I publish this along with my original notes below. In my view this endgame study is highly instructive and I encourage all readers to spend a bit of time running through it.

My thanks go to Dave for taking the time to find the answer. I hope he found the process of uncovering it as interesting as I did failing to find it!

Finally, I’d like to post a witty little denouement to a blitz game that I played last week at my other club, Leeds. I was playing white and feeling pretty glum in the position given below. I had been well ahead in the game and successively blundered away my advantage. Now I seemed destined to lose. But then, I managed to find a nice defensive resource. What does white play in the position below? Try to find the solution before hitting the “forward” button.

Following on from an article I posted a month or so back about knowing the right time to resign I’d like to offer this example as evidence to support the argument that, in blitz games, you really should play on in a theoretically lost position for as long as possible because you never know what might turn up!