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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