PR Quiz by Seán Coffey
PR Quiz by Seán Coffey
The first chess magazine I subscribed to was CHESS Sutton Coldfield, back in the days when it was still edited by B. H. Wood. One of its keynote features in those days was the annual Christmas quiz, which entered the festive spirit with a generally relaxed approach, not always adhering to the rules of standard chess, or even of fair play. All good fun, though.
Those quizzes were easy to read but must have been extremely hard to write. So the quiz below stays relatively close to standard chess, and all problems are based on the same set of rules( and no trick questions).
The game is Progressive Chess, sometimes called‘ PR’: White plays one move, Black plays two, White plays three, and so on. A sharp way to play chess!
There are some extra rules: all moves must be legal in standard chess in the given board position, check ends the turn immediately, and a player who has no legal moves before the end of a turn is stalemated. An e. p. capture can only be made on the first move of a turn, the captured pawn having moved two squares at any time in the previous turn and gone no further. The standard rules don’ t say that the square crossed still has to be empty, but I assume that’ s implied.
There is one other rule commonly used in serious play: in‘ Italian’ progressive chess a player who checks before the last move of his allotted turn loses the game, rather than just finishing the turn early. This leads to so-called‘ Italian mates’, where a player is forced to give check on the first move of his sequence and so loses. Is it clear to you why this rule makes sense? Me neither, and none of the problems below involve Italian mates.
One of the main sources of information on this game is D. B. Pritchard’ s book Popular Chess Variants( Batsford, 2000). Popular, relative to other chess variants, that is, as these are all fringe games. PR, though, is popular enough that several correspondence tournaments have been held, mostly in Italy, and there is some opening theory, which is reviewed by Pritchard. There seems to have even been at one time a database of around 10,000 games maintained by the Italian organisation A. I. S. E.; however their web pages don’ t seem to have been updated since 2004.
But enough background, on with the quiz. Problems are in roughly increasing order of difficulty. Solutions to problems 1-4 are in the back of this issue, and the rest will be given in the next issue.
Problem 1.
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White to play and mate( 5)
A nice easy one to warm up. This is from a correspondence tournament played in 1995, via Variant Chess, a magazine published by the British Chess Variant Society, Volume 3, Issue 21, Autumn 1996, pages 7-9( article by Peter Wood). Peter Coast
- George Jelliss: 1. e4 2. f5, f4(?) 3. d4, Bxf4, Qh5 + 4. g6, gxh5, Bh6, Bxf4.
Problem 2.
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Black to play and mate( 4)
From Pritchard, this was a win by S. Palmieri, after the sequence 1. d4 2. e5, exd4 3. h4(??), Bg5, Bxd8. The mate is elegant, but the most striking aspect of the game is White’ s h4. Was he trying to support the bishop? A shocker.
Problem 3.
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Black to play and mate( 4)
Again from Pritchard, this was a win by M. Leoncini, after 1. f4 2. Nc6, d5 3. e4, exd5, Nh3. Black has any number of ways to win in 5 moves, but 4 requires a bit of thought.
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