The Art of Composing: The III guide
For a chess lover, one of the greatest topics of joy is chess studies. The incredible aesthetic satisfaction received after successfully solving them is parallel to none.
Try to solve these, for example.
They are not easy, but I guarantee you, solving them will give you a high sense of pride and happiness.
A few years back, I had posted this mate in 4 in one of my other blogs:
I have composed this myself. Now, if this was created by someone else, and I had solved it, I would have definitely felt great. But the reality felt greater.
Do you see where I am getting at? There is something better than solving a study...
Composing one!
The III Guide:
Its not easy to compose chess puzzles. They have to be aesthetically nice, objectively correct, and very creative. The good part is that its a very fun and satisfactory process, so the hard work is well worth it!
The "III" guide is a nice little technique to make your work a little easier. It stands for inspiration, imagination and improvisation.
The basic idea is, first we get the inspiration (the concept, the idea) from somewhere. It can be absolutely random, solving puzzles, checking openings, checking tablebases, scrolling twitter. We see an interesting idea and we stop, get our mind thinking. Then we imagine. We imagine how the idea we see in front of ourselves can gain more attraction. We try to be as creative as possible. Once we have a brief picture in our mind of what we aim for, we start trying to create the position. We create, re-create, check, double-check. Ultimately, the goal is to arrive at a position which has no flaws/alternate solutions, has a pretty solution, and gives the solver aesthetic joy upon solving.
In order to explain better, let me show examples of some studies I tried to compose very recently.
This position came from Jorden VF-Magnus Carlsen, Wijk 2023. Here Magnus went for 1...Ra6 (after 13 mins of thought), 2.Kb5-Ra1 and made a comfortable draw. I got curious to see why not direct Ra1? So I started analyzing a bit, and got to the conclusion that 2.Rc7 is what worried him there- now the idea is to go Rc3-Ra3.
This was the interesting point- once White plays Rc7, one way to draw for Black is Rxa7, with a kind of complex line which was not easy to see during the game. But the other way to draw is far weirder- 2...Kf4!?
Why would you go back? And if you go back, why not take the g4 pawn along with you. Turns out the point of this move is 3.Rc4-Ke5, 4.Rc5-Kd4! White's king is boxed in and its a draw after 5.Ra5-Rb1.
This intrigued me, and I decided to try to compose something. At the current moment, this position could not be considered a fair study, since it had a dual solution (Rxa7, Kf4).
I tried a lot of positions, with very very small differences, to get the desired result (it will take time, be patient!) and came up with this:
1...Kf4! and Black holds. There are some pretty complex lines, its a very interesting position to analyze (I don't go through the lines because this article is not about that). Its a nice study in itself, but I still wanted to make the position a bit more advanced, because at a good level, its very clear that 1...Kf4 is the only move after a little thought. A bit more of chopping and changing, and I arrived at...
1...g6!! 2.Rc7-Kf4!!=
The final step is to reverse the position, because its always White to play in studies.
The next example is from something I found while solving puzzles.
Black to play. I was solving this exercise with some friends. After a pretty long thought, we came up with 1...Rd1. The answer, however is 1...Rxd4 2.b7-Rd1, 3.Rf1-Rd8 (or 2.a7-Rg4, 3.Kf1-Rb4 with the twin threats of Rxb6 and Rb1#). We missed this relatively simple sequence, but were confused- why didn't Rd1 work? Turns out it also works!
So our plan was this:
...and the end position is winning, as confirmed by tablebases.
The idea seemed very nice to me- transposition to a winning rook ending! Not easy to see from afar. So I set about trying to make this into a study... (again, at this particular position it wasn't one since its a dual solution).
And I realized the simple thing to do is put White's rook on f4! then there is no Rxd4 available. However, then it becomes a pretty forcing sequence, so I decided to make it a bit tougher by adding options. After some tries, this is what I had:
1...Nxd4, 2.Bxd4-Rd1 etc. Adding the knight made the position much more complex as Black has to consider other attractive options like 1...Ne3 in the first position. Overall, the theme of reaching a Rook pawn vs Rook endgame from such a complex position really attracted me!
And the final step, reverse the position.
The final example is probably my favourite. While the previous ones the goal was just to win, this is a 'mate-in' study. Scrolling twitter, I came across a fantastic queen sacrifice that made me stop instantly:
The fact that the queen could be taken by two different pieces and both of them led to mate was pretty cool. I started wondering.. how many more Black pieces can I put that control e5, and still Qe5 is possible? One by one, I made small changes to the position, kept testing them, and bam!
This one probably took me around a 100 tries (no kidding!) but it was all worth it. Here's the final study:
White to play and mate in 4! (solve the study to see all the different mates possible and the nice point of this puzzle!)
t̶h̶e̶ b̶l̶u̶n̶d̶e̶r̶s̶ a̶r̶e̶ a̶l̶l̶ t̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ o̶n̶ t̶h̶e̶ b̶o̶a̶r̶d̶, w̶a̶i̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ t̶o̶ b̶e̶ m̶a̶d̶e̶ The compositions are all there in your mind, waiting to be made. Try now.
(P.S. Have you ever composed a chess study? How did you go about it? What technique did you use? Let me know in the comments!)
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