Today's Daily Puzzle 8/23/20: Try All Move Orders
Hello puzzlers! Today's daily puzzle is a great example and reminder that when you see the opportunity for a combination, make sure to calculate all possible move orders of that calculation. In the puzzle today there seems to be an opportunity to both fork the bishop and king and to pin the bishop against the king with the rook. But which one should you do first? Or does it matter?
A nice and straightforward one today! How did you do? Did you find the right move order or did you try to pin the bishop first? Today's nugget of truth is: in my experience usually the more forcing move order is the optimal move order to go for. In today's case, the pawn push forces white to respond immediately whereas pinning the bishop gives white some time to regroup.
Yesterday's Daily Puzzle
As is typical for Saturday puzzles, this one was tough. This puzzle required you to synthesize two pieces of information: Black is dangerously close to getting checkmated and black's queen can be won using this information but immediately doing so also loses white's queen. Thus, white might as well get a rook for this before he goes off and get's black's queen!
Bonus Puzzle Announcement
It's been a while since I've posted a bonus puzzle, but stay tuned for Tuesday's post where I will indeed have a bonus puzzle for everyone to solve!
Nick
