Some nice training positions....

Hello all,

During the last two summers I was lucky enough to land some nice research positions at NASA, and with the extra cash, since my living expenses were so low, I treated myself to some chess coaching from former (multiple times) US Champ Larry Christiansen, and also Ukranian national team trainer Vladimir Grabinsky, who just recently wrote a nice report on a blitz tournament in Lviv for Chessbase. Anyway, Grabinsky is also the trainer of child prodigy and nearly 2700 GM Andrei Volokitin. Volokitin is one of my favorite players, mostly for his amazing calculation and creativity at the board. His games are always incredibly complicated and deep, and I thought to myself, "If this guy made Volokitin this way, maybe he can do it to me too!". Anyway, I got weekly problems that stretched my calculation abilities beyond what I've been used to, and despite some failure and frustration, I'm definitely better for all of the work I've put in. It's been a year now since I've taken lessons with Vladimir, but I was digging through the problems he gave me today, and I thought I'd share two of my favorites:

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The first is lovely, just solved it.

My Method for solving composed studies:
If I cannot see it right away I look at the pawns and try to figure why
each one is there. This gives you ideas.

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I enjoy the logic involved in solving these problems:

In #1, you know that it's going to be based on winning the queen for a minor piece since White is so far behind in the point count. It becomes clear that something snazzy needs to happen here, since Black will answer almost anything with ...Qh5.

In the second one, it should become pretty clearly quite quickly that White needs to find some way to save both the bishops, since otherwise he won't have enough mating material.

Originally posted by !~TONY~!
I enjoy the logic involved in solving these problems:

In #1, you know that it's going to be based on winning the queen for a minor piece since White is so far behind in the point count. It becomes clear that something snazzy needs to happen here, since Black will answer almost anything with ...Qh5.

In the second one, it should become pretty clearly ...[text shortened]... find some way to save both the bishops, since otherwise he won't have enough mating material.

Hmm ... how are people hiding the solution to the problem. I know you can post pgn by using the tag but how do people hide the solution?

Originally posted by CCNoob
Hmm ... how are people hiding the solution to the problem. I know you can post pgn by using the tag but how do people hide the solution?

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