Problem solved

When I select puzzles to accompany this column, I stick to the plain vanilla. The stipulation must be short and sweet, and one move solutions must be accepted (though I like to include a few further words of explanation). Alas, a thousand such puzzles can never do justice to the wondrous ingenuity of chess composers.

Longer mating problems and ‘studies’ (where the objective is to find a winning or drawing sequence) allow considerably more artistic scope. Then there are genres which maintain the rules of movement but subvert the players’ objectives. Those include helpmates (in which both sides choreograph their moves to engineer a checkmate) and selfmates (in which one side attempts to force the other to deliver checkmate). Selfmates I find particularly mind-bending, though the aesthetic dividends can be considerable.

All these were featured at the World Team Chess Solving Championship, held in Riga in late July. Solving competitions are like a series of exams, in which competitors solve problems against the clock.