can someone tell me the answer for this chess problem

cover of the first issue featured a chess problem composed by Otto Wurzburg

white mate in 2 moves

been wrecking my head for past half hour

My first thought is that if I had this position why would I care if I mate in 2 or 10?  The only thing worth thinking about is not stalemating.

He's got no legal moves here but if we put him in check now that's not going to get there in just two.  This is a study so I didn't even consider that, there has to be a waiting move here, but what?  What if we can drive him to D5 and also take away E6 and then go for check?  So Re2 does this, he's got one move now, to D5 where we want him, the rook also takes away the E6 square, and now all we need to do is check him with the bishop and he falls.

Kinda fun to try to work through these but with a problem like this it's a moot point, mating here is a raw beginner problem and you don't get any more points than 1 by working efficiently

#3 After Re2, black king can also go to b5 as our bishop is now blocked. In addition, the black pawn can move too.

I would also try rook to e2. 

The king cannot go to b5. Rook to c2 checkmate if he does. 

So this is all forced, so after Rc2 the only move is Kb5, and now there's only one legal move , back to c6.  Bg2 both puts him in check and takes away this only escape square so it's mate in two.

If we play Bg2+ immediately though, he can block with the pawn and then there's no way to mate him next move.  This is why we need him to move his king in front of the pawn, and also take away e5 and moving the rook accomplishes both.

People have different ways of solving this and what I did is to start with looking at the bishop check, saw the pawn block and then thought if we get him to block the pawn then he won't be able to stop this bishop check.  It's a tricky puzzle but all studies tend to be

Then I guess it's M2 in different ways depending on Black's response. Patriot pointed out one of the other possibilities. To address my remaining point, if the pawn moves: Re2 d5 RE6#.

hmm

does it really matter?

true

ok

I see what you mean now about the pawn push, I was so focused on getting the king to move that I missed that he could move the pawn lol, but I'm still pretty new   So yeah, the pawn move doesn't help because we mate with the rook as pointed out.  So this is even more interesting now, he moves the king and we mate with the bishop, he moves the pawn, only other move, we mate with the rook.  I can't imagine playing this in a blitz game as it did take me longer to solve this than you would have in such a game, but any of us could bust out a few quick moves to get to mate every quickly in this position, and again, you don't get anything extra with mate in 2 versus 10

Re2

nice

that was good

Mate in 3

Hey OP, good news: we, the council of extremely brilliant minds, conferred about your puzzle at length. We pointed out variations and laid out arguments. Then some chad 2000 came in like "you kids tire me" and put the solution in one of these board thingies. It's pretty cool, you should check it out.

You understood everything about the 2000 guy properly.