Teaching Beginners

X marks the spot(s) in this mate in two that I use with a lot of beginning chess players.

I'm rather worried that it took me two minutes to find the answer!

Originally posted by Fat Lady
I'm rather worried that it took me two minutes to find the answer!

Did you find all three solutions?

Originally posted by Wulebgr
X marks the spot(s) in this mate in two that I use with a lot of beginning chess players.

[fen]8/3Q4/8/8/8/3K4/8/3k4 w - - 0 1[/fen]

Clever.

D

I only found one solution, I generally stop looking when I've found a forced mate! I'll look for the others now.

Ok. Other two solutions didn't take too long to find! I wish there was only one answer though.

Originally posted by Sicilian Smaug
Aha, Looked at it before and thought was just one answer. See the other 2 now you've said. Nice 1 .It's all about the X 😉

I find the X and three solutions to be a useful heuristic for teaching the pattern recognition that enables chess skill.

Of course, among chess problem composers more than one solution means the problem is cooked.

Interesting. Of course it's also mate in two if it's black to move as well. Two's the magic number!

crikey..I found the *1* solution pretty quickly...took me a bit longer with the other *2* 😳😀

I also stop when I find mate. Number 2 was easy to find based on the first one. However I would have never found number 3 without the mention of the X. Good teaching method.

*ahem* Yep, that took me about 4-5 minutes to find the other two.
It shouldn't be that hard considering there's only two moves for black! 😳

Very nice. Had me seriously doubting my abilities as a chess player for a few anxious minutes.

Help. I see 2 when nmoving Q to bdark square beside K and has mate off either diagonal. Where's the other?

😳

Originally posted by malinga
Help. I see 2 when nmoving Q to bdark square beside K and has mate off either diagonal. Where's the other?

😳

Hint: it's the only other square from which the queen can reach both a1 and g1 (the two squares it can reach in the first solution you found).

g7/a7?