Amazing Immortal Chess Endgame - Jim Plaskett's Puzzle - provenance involving Mikhail Tal!

â–ºPlaylists: http://www.chessworld.net/chessclubs/playlistvideosstructure.asp â–ºKingscrusher's Greatest Hit Videos! : http://tinyurl.com/6vvx6qe â–ºPlay FREE online chess at http://www.chessworld.net or realtime at http://www.chessclub.com/from/kingscrusher [Event "?"] [Site "?"] [Date "2012.11.26"] [Round "?"] [White "beautiful, study"] [Black "?"] [Result "*"] [Annotator "Tryfon"] [SetUp "1"] [FEN "8/3P3k/n2K3p/2p3n1/1b4N1/2p1p1P1/8/3B4 w - - 0 0"] [PlyCount "27"] {An endgame study, or just study, is a composed chess position-that is, one that has been made up rather than one from an actual game-presented as a sort of puzzle, in which the aim of the solver is to find a way for one side (usually White) to win or draw, as stipulated, against any moves the other side plays. ... .. ..} 1. Nf6+ (1. d8=Q Nf7+) 1... Kg7 ( 1... Kh8 2. d8=Q+ {And it is mate in 3}) (1... Kg6 2. Bh5+ Kf5 (2... Kxf6 3. d8=Q+) (2... Kg7 3. d8=Q) (2... Kxf6 3. d8=Q+) 3. d8=Q {Anhite is winning}) 2. Nh5+ Kg6 (2... Kh7 3. Bc2+) (2... Kf7 3. d8=Q) 3. Bc2+ {A very advanced drag and drop tactic in effect - dropping the King in a kind of mating net! Very difficult indeed for computers to find and justify! Justified at about depth 19 by Houdini 3 as being good for White :)} Kxh5 4. d8=Q Nf7+ (4... c4+ 5. Kd5 Kg4 6. Qb6 Kf3 7. Qxa6 e2 8. Qf6+ Kg2 9. Qe5 Kf1 10. Qf4+ Kg1 11. Qe3+ Kf1 12. Kxc4 e1=N) (4... Kg4 {GM Rowson claims black can actually hold} 5. Qf6 Kxg3 6. Qf1 Nf7+ 7. Qxf7 e2 8. Qg6+ Kf2 9. Qf6+ Ke1 10. Qxh6 Ba3 11. Qe3) 5. Ke6 Nxd8+ 6. Kf5 e2 7. Be4 e1=N 8. Bd5 c2 9. Bc4 c1=N 10. Bb5 Nc7 11. Ba4 {Provenance - why it is important in art! Who composed this study? GM James Plaskett (Spain) says: "There is an obscure mythology about the puzzle/^s provenance. I think Graham Hillyard was the first person to show it to me, in 1986, or earlier. The study appears in Gufeld/^s last book, The Search for Mona Lisa. His story is that it pops up circa 1990. There are stories of Tal having received an anonymous letter, pre 1986, of a lorry driver having composed it. Gufeld says that since nobody has yet claimed to be the inventor of the study, he proposes that it dropped in from outer space. I am sure I read somewhere that sombody ending in -shvili did it. He says that during the 1992 Olympiad the Malaysian the player MokTze Meng received an anonymous phone call saying that here was a gift for Gufeld - and the voice then dictated the position. Gufeld says that at the 1992 Olympiad both Karpov and Kasparov were amazed by the study." But there are also stories about Tal seeing the position in Brussels in April 1987, not being able to solve it and then suddenly coming back, from a 10 minutes walk in the park, to the press center with the solution. In the database the author of the problem is given as G. van Breukelen, and the place of publication as the Dutch magazine Schakend Nederland. Most baffling was the date: 1990. What about the position being showed to Tal in 1987?! Obviously the best strategy is to contact the leading endgame expert, Harold van den Heijden himself: "My conclusion is that Gijs van Breukelen composed the study in the 1970s and showed it to a couple of friends. Later, in 1990, van Breukelen decided to publish the study in the magazine Schakend Nederland." Another endgame expert, Roycroft concludes the same: "The composer of this fine study is the Dutch composer Gijs van Breukelen, who demonstrated it as an example of his own work at a meeting of ARVES held in 1992 in Delft. The position with the author/^s name was already in Schakend Nederland of iii1990 as an original. The composer said at the ARVES meeting that he had composed it in the mid-1970s and shown it to several friends, but had neither sent it for publication nor entered it for a tourney. Having somehow penetrated the player circuit it circulated rapidly, acquiring journalistic colour en route though being associated either with a (totally fictitious) Ukrainian tractor-driver, or with a very specific (but equally spurious) game between leading masters. The late IGM Tal was one of the active propagators, but when asked he claimed he could not remember who had first shown it to him." References: Chessbase articles about this puzzle: (1) http://www.chessbase.com/puzzle/puzz16a.htm (2) http://www.chessbase.com/ puzzle/puzz16b.htm .} Ne2 12. Bd1 Nf3 13. Bxe2 Nce6 14. Bxf3# * Prior notable Youtube videos about this Endgame study: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8ErcUCQoUs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laLKG2hyuh4 â–ºSubscribe for my regular chess videos: http://goo.gl/zpktUK â–ºSupport the channel by donating via PayPal: http://goo.gl/7HJcDq Thumbnail Plaskett By The original uploader was Jaapvanderkooij at Dutch Wikipedia (Jonathan Levitt) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons