Motus Mentis

One Comment

1. colinhutton says

   Hi Malcolm

   So I spent a humiliatingly long 40min staring at the diagram to compose a mate in five. Didn’t match with the elegant solution in your link. So I then had to spend a further 10min setting up board and pieces to then spot that white could defeat my ‘solution’ by sacrificing his Q, deferring his inevitable fate for another half dozen moves. Curses!

   Three of us have been meeting for over ten years to play chess on Wednesday mornings. We switched early on to Fisher Random and then a year or two later to Hutton* Random. The latter has the additional feature that black may, in his response to white’s opening move, advance a pawn on files a – c or f – h by three squares.

   Think about it! It significantly offsets (or even reverses – say 10% of games) opener’s advantage and the game becomes highly strategic from move one. Try it out if you can engineer the opportunity. If you do, let me know what you think!

   *A totally original (afaik) idea of mine, published for the first time here on WakaWakaWaka, and I am hereby laying claim to naming rights!!

   (I may send an email to BV promoting my idea to him as well – even though I get the impression he is not a regular player these days. I suspect he drops by a club occasionally and then enjoys beating up a couple of the regulars)

   Posted December 12, 2017 at 5:29 am | Permalink