Hidden links

There is a sublime satisfaction in a good detective thriller. We will, of course, have accessed the same facts as our sharp-witted sleuth. The fleck of yellow paint on the raincoat meant little to us, as did the creaking door and the page missing from the notebook. But at last the alibi is dismantled, and from the tangle of contradictions emerges an elegant, coherent thread. Genius, they say, is seeing what everyone else sees and thinking what no one else has thought.

On the chessboard, we also agree on many of the facts: this rook enjoys an open file, that bishop is pinning the knight. And much tactical reasoning is straightforward: ‘The queen is guarding against the mate, so let’s try to deflect it.’ But once in a while, one thrills to see a move which reveals links between pieces that had barely entered the imagination.

The position shown in the first diagram was brought to my attention by the splendidly forthright book Move First, Think Later, written by Willy Hendriks (New In Chess, 2012).