[gwnn]

This position occurred in a chess game after Black's fourth move (they didn't make the best moves). Can you say which they were?

In case the attachment doesn't work, it is almost the starting position, but White's knight on g1 is missing, while Black misses the knight on g8 and pawns from d7 and e7.

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[zasanya]

 gwnn, on 2011-April-01, 02:02, said:

This position occurred in a chess game after Black's fourth move (they didn't make the best moves). Can you say which they were?

In case the attachment doesn't work, it is almost the starting position, but White's knight on g1 is missing, while Black misses the knight on g8 and pawns from d7 and e7.

Are you sure the problem is stated correctly? It seems to imply that a white knight a black knight and 2 black pawns have been captured.
A very similar problem I had come across was "Two patzers were playing a game of chess. After black's 4th move , a white knight and a black knight had been captured, a black pawn was on d5 and all other pieces were on their original squares.What could have been the sequence of the moves?

[gwnn]

yes I'm sure. it works.

[gwnn]

solution to zasanya's:

Spoiler

1 Nc3 Nf6
2 Nf3 e6
3 Ng1 Nd5
4 Nxd5 exd5

[WellSpyder]

How about this?

Spoiler

Nf3 e5
Nxe5 Ne7
Nxd7 Nc6
Nxb8 Nxb8

[gwnn]

yes

[WellSpyder]

Took a few false starts, though - I thought for a while I was going to have to ask for 5 moves not 4....

[zasanya]

OK I got it The valiant knight can go on a suicide mission any which way he wants
Let me post one .
The Grandmaster walked into the chess club .Grandmaster disdainfully said, "I will take white. My first 4 moves are 1)f3 2)Kf2 3) Kg3 4)kh4 You as black may play whatever you want to.100 dollar bet." For once the grandmaster lost as black checkmated him on his 4th move.How?

[gwnn]

edit: wrong answer. will think a little more

[Trumpace]

 zasanya, on 2011-April-01, 07:21, said:

The Grandmaster walked into the chess club .Grandmaster disdainfully said, "I will take white. My first 4 moves are 1)f3 2)Kf2 3) Kg3 4)kh4 You as black may play whatever you want to.100 dollar bet." For once the grandmaster lost as black checkmated him on his 4th move.How?

I believe the following works

Spoiler

1) f3 e5
2) Kf2 Qf6
3) Kg3 Qxf3 check.
4) Kh4 Be7 mate.

[gwnn]

use hidden text next time

anyway I would just play Nf6, Nd5, Nc3 and NxQ

[Trumpace]

 gwnn, on 2011-April-05, 16:49, said:

use hidden text next time

anyway I would just play Nf6, Nd5, Nc3 and NxQ

Sorry, edited.

[Quantumcat]

To all you chess gurus out there, I want to learn to play well but have no one to play against. Can one become a good chess player just by doing puzzles? My old phone used to have a chess-puzzle program on it but my new one doesn't :-(

Also how long did it take you to be able to read chess-code and understand/visualise it without having to draw a diagram of a board to follow sequences of moves?

[gwnn]

Depends on the puzzles, there are very nice short combinations that make your thought processes sharper, in contrast with "mate in 3" books which only have a more distant effect. Another nice thing you can do without playing chess is getting a tournament book and reading through the annotated games. However, if you want to become better at chess there's no good substitute to actually playing in a few tournaments (with real 4+ hour games) and trying to analyse your games subsequently. As to your second question, I don't know, I learned to play chess when I was 6 or 7, went to some training where we used chess code all the time and recently began playing again, but the board didn't stop being familiar to me. I played blindfolded two games but we were both hanging pieces left and right and lost on grounds of illegal moves in both, so I'm not exactly a guru.

Speaking of how useless artificial puzzles are, Black just checkmated White with 5 .. Nxh1#. How on Earth did that happen?