Inspired by a puzzle posted in our Delaware Chess Forum by Jonathan Martin, I thought I’d direct you to two nifty chess puzzle sites. Sure, there are lots of puzzle sites out there, no doubt, but here are two more to add to your list.
The first site is http://www.mazeworks.com/chessprb/index.htm This site offers an excellent java-based mating puzzle each day. The great thing about these puzzles is that you can actually move the pieces around and try your solutions. This is especially good for those who need practice visualizing where the pieces will be after a couple of moves. The only thing I wish you could do is turn off the fact that it tells you how many moves the mate should occur in. It would be much better practice if you didn’t know it was “mate in 3″ since that information in itself steers you away from certain lines. But all in all this site offers great puzzles of various difficulty.
The second site is http://www.logicalchess.com/hcc/puzzles/puzzles.html. What is nice about this site is three-fold. First, the problems aren’t all “mate” problems - there are problems where you must find the best move, which is typically more helpful in an actual game. Second, there are three levels of each problem set, easy/moderate/difficult, which makes it nice for various player levels. Third, there are positions from actual games rather than all fabricated board setups.
So hop on over to those sites and exercise your brain - but be warned, you may be there for a while.
Until next time….
Tom Fleetwood