A rare win at chess

I do not win that many games of Chess so please indulge me in rejoicing in this win. I only play chess on Facebook these days and most of these games are against a former fellow member of Weymouth Chess Club, who always beats me.

These loses mean that my chess grade keeps falling so occasionally I accept challengers from other players and I do manage to win some of these games and so my grade recovers a little.

This is one of my recent wins that I particularly enjoyed because of the way it ended. Black had wasted a lot of time moving his queen several times while I developed all of my pieces. Black's last move was e5 (PK4) in an attempt to bring his bishop into play, but it is too late. Can you see what I played? And do not cheat by looking in the moves box!


The winning move, exposes the weakness of Black's position where there is just one rook on hand to protect the king against White's onslaught of a queen, two rooks and a bishop. In a position like this sacrificing a rook, or even a queen, is immaterial as the checkmate is certain.

So the move I played, Rf6 (RB6) is not really a sacrifice, it puts unbearable pressure on h6 and so quickly opens up the Black king. The game quickly ended, 24. Rf6 Qd5, 25. Rxh6 Kg8, 26. Rxg7+ Kxg7, 28. Qg5++.

A lucky win at chess

A quick look at this position shows that white (that's me) is three pawns down in the ending and that black's pawns are well placed in the middle of the board.

Normally that would be enough for an easy win for black but I kept the queens on in a desperate attempt to get a draw through repeatedly checking the black king.

I offered black a draw several moves ago but he declined thinking (probably correctly) that he could force one of his extra pawns through.

The luck came when black made the mistake of moving his king away from his queen which meant that his queen could not block checks from my queen.

This mistake was compounded when the black king moved to the edge of the board where its movement is severely restricted.

My previous move was to take my king from g2 to h3, stopping his king from moving to h2, which meant that suddenly my manic attempts to drawn the game were rewarded with a simple win.

The only move that black had to delay the checkmate was to play his queen from e2 to d2 to put me in check but playing my pawn from g3 to g4 blocked black's check and inflicted one of my own. (This is the position shown here.)

Black's only legal move in this position is queen takes pawn on g4 to which I would reply queen takes queen which delivers checkmate. So black resigned and I am one lucky bunny.

Playing chess again

A recent, and very successful, feature of technology platforms like Facebook and the iPhone is applications that allow developers to significantly enrich the already impressive environments.

Thanks to the Facebook chess application I am now playing again, including two concurrent games (one with each colour) against somebody I first played about 35 years ago at the Weymouth Chess Club.

I lose almost all of those games but I win most of my others and am now ranked in the top 500 players, out of a total of just over 30,000 :-)

Here is one of my recent wins. I am white and am materially well in front but can you see the wining move?