White to play and win

Here is a nice endgame puzzle for you.

White to play and win.

Great ending! The first part is a well known trick to lock away the bishop, but most surprising is that white needs to sac the f4-pawn first to provide maneuvering space for the king during the skirmishes on the other wing!

That is correct 1.f4!! is the best first move, 1.Bd1! will win here also.

White to play and win:

This one is not easy unless you are familiar with studies, even Stockfish chokes a little bit on it (but not much).

Remember, all you have to do is find a win not the entire mate solution in the PGN, but if you are using engine assistance then you should find the mate.

10

Hard

hi

💔

Here's another beautiful win employing the Novotny theme:

White to play and win:

This one ends up being a mate in 12.

Btw, Oleg Pervakov is probably the best study composer of this era. I like to think my composition mind works very much like his but he is a long way ahead in the quantity of his ideas and his production stats. I am very proud to finish ahead of him in a study solving tournament in 2013 though!

Stavrietsky is very good also.

I suppose so, don't know him. I understand some subjects quite well but I'm poor on people and social interactions. I have given up on the goal of all-round knowledge of the chess composition field and limit my contributions to bits and pieces. Btw, Pervakov's rating as the probably best study composer today, comes from a chess.com Lesson module featuring a selection from his best work!

Here is a very nice endgame study:

Some years ago I did a lot of training on 5-unit endgames and I recall finding the final moves of this ending including "the trick". However I could never have solved the whole endgame study interactively. I would have needed to fiddle the pieces with my hands and on the board as we are allowed to do in solving tournaments.

There is a message in here. A major tool chess.com could add for solving professional style would be a parallel scratch window where you can manipulate and analyze chess positions at will without help of an engine. Whatever you conclude you can enter as solution moves in the online solving window. That would approximately mimic how compositions are now solved in professional solving tournaments. Of course you can simulate this process by keeping a physical chess set nearby but a digital screen is simpler and can do the job just as well.

Yes, your idea of a interactive variation board is something that is long overdue here at chess.com, fortunately I have a GUI that I can copy and paste positions into, but not everybody has or wants a GUI.