Lesson #8: Stalemate

Today's meeting started not with the lesson subject, stalemates, but with the nice position from Magnus's defense of the world championship:

If you remember, the winning move was 1. Qh6+. If black responds with 1..Kxh6 then white wins with 2. Rh8# and if black responds with 1..gxh6 then white has 2. Rxf7#. We approached how one might find this move in an amusing way, by asking "What is the most absurd move, perhaps the most absurd check on the board?". I try to put checks and captures at the top of my candidate moves list, but admit I would have tossed this one out before giving it serious consideration and missed the tactic.

I was lucky enough to be watching this game live, along with the other tiebreaks:

After Sergei had moved, Judit Polgar, who was commentating, impressively found and exclaimed the line a while before Magnus played it.

Next we reviewed some of the fork homework from the previous lesson. The hardest puzzles were not the ones where a piece forks two others, but where a piece forks a piece and a square. In all the examples, the square was one where, if the knight occupied it, checkmate would result. Trying to stretch your imagination, I asked "if your knight could TELEPORT anywhere, what dream square would he get to?". Then we'd see if, through normal, non-teleporting moves, we could realize that dream. Like the Magnus game, we think of the absurd, and then see how well it can be joined with reality.

Since these problems exploited a checkmate square, but there was no immediate check, we modified our three pre-move questions:

1. What is my opponent doing?
2. Are there any hanging pieces?
3. Are there any checks? How safe are the kings?

Remember the general mechanism working behind forks: We give the opponent two problems, and they have only one move to try to solve both.

Ok, on to the new topic, stalemates. This is a tough, technical issue for some people to get. Remember the criteria for checkmate:

1. king is under threat (check)
2. there are no legal moves (no way to escape check)

Stalemate is the same, except for the first requirement:

1. king is NOT under threat (no check)
2. there are no legal moves

A few examples and exercises were given in class on the demo board. Stalemate is considered a draw, and thus it can be useful for you to escape defeat if you can force yourself into a stalemate. And that was what the two homework problems involved: