Joshe

Close. But Re6 allows Bh5. Still a winning position but not forced. There's a slightly better line, although still not forced if white plays perfectly.

interesting position I was in earlier. How does black win?

Deep spirituality is destabilizing for most people. Spirituality is for the extraordinarily curious and/or escape-seeker. It's destabilizing even for these people, but identity structures and cognitive addictions allow for persistance. Maybe you could say light spirituality is beneficial for most.

It depends on the goal and depth of immersion. Music is good for free-form, unstructured, non-targeted, creative contemplation. But if you need to target a very specific thing, it reduces bandwidth and signal, so it can get in the way and spawn new lines of contemplation that may be creative, but not necessarily efficient.

Wise words. I had a similar idea: create a library of insights and people can choose which ones they want to see, then lead them to it with carefully designed stepping stones. Would it just be like "pearls of wisdom" and you'd design a tests for each one? Like a koan? Would you categorize or group them into various buckets like self-help, spirituality, etc? I think it's a good idea if designed well. Chess is a closed domain and consciousness is open (undetermined by rules), so it would be challenging to gamify.

My dad has been playing for 20 years as a hobby and still 900 because he refuses to learn and adhere to the basic principles. Thinks he above them. lol.

Nice! Leo's attempt does stop the pawn but it turns into this:

@Leo Gura What does black do next?

Yeah, a good metacognitive foundation would produce gains much faster. If I were serious about getting good, I'd spend most of my time drilling tactical motifs and game review, asking questions not only about where I went wrong, but how: was the error calculation, vision, calculation inertia, etc.? Game review is where it's at. I started playing when I was 13 but I keep coming and going from it. Never really studied beyond YT videos. Learned a few openings, principles, etc. I'm around 1550 rapid (10 min games). I'm pretty sure I could reach 2000 but not motivated enough to put in the time. What is your rating and how long have you been playing and how much study have you put in @integral? They say once you reach 1800-2000, it becomes a real grind because tactics and basic opening theory no longer give you much advantage and at that point, you have to go even deeper into opening theory and end game, which would be a ton of work.

a2 captures b3 then c3 to c4. None of it matters though because pusing e6 is better.

I've always been fascinated by what keeps me from seeing the obvious when I'm sufficiently deep into a line. For example, if you were to give me this puzzle: I could find it immediately. But since I was sufficiently deep into the line, my mind couldn't see it. It's always a matter of being too zoomed in. Like here, maybe the pattern of "they take my piece, I take theirs back" was operating so strongly in the background that it prevented me from seeing I could just ignore their capture. The solution would be to somehow see each position as if it we're totally new, inheriting no assumptions from the previous line. But how to clear the inertia or fixation from the previous line? This seems like a high-leverage meta skill. "Calculation interia". Need to figure out how to clear the cache.

lol. I see. You just ignore the rook and keep pushing p. Damnit!

The easy thing to calculate is the king can't catch the pawn before promotion due to bishop and pawn working together, and obviously black's rook is blocked, so it can't reach it in time. But, you can catch the pawn if after capturing the rook on h7 and white moves pawn e6, by sacrificing the rook for the bishop, and the king could make it over in time to stop the pawn. After that pawn falls, the position would look something like: But this is lost.

@integral Nevermind, I see what you were saying. I was assuming e6 was obvious after Kxh7. If you made a move other than that, the position would be better for black. Nice puzzle!

Not true after Rxh7. Look at the eval bar on the left. Black to move here: Nothing black can do other than take the rook, the bishop, or try to check the king. Probably best is to take the rook. But if they do that, there's no way to prevent e5 pawn promotion without taking the bishop as well.

I was just going over possible continuations. No matter the continuation, black can't win if white plays: a8 -> a7 -> h7. Is that not the solution?

I know how to win but not sure if it's optimal. Rook to a7 then a8, then take black rook on h7. Black only has 2 options if not in check. 1. Recapture white rook on h7 2. Trade b2 rook for white bishop and after a1 pawn recaptures rook, black king recaptures rook on h7, which liquidates everything but pawns. White promotes faster with option 1, which looks like this: But black can take the long way around losing with option 2. After liquidation, it looks like this: What am I missing?

A sequence that "is winning" or forced checkmate?

In that case, you'd recapture rook which would lead to white getting a passed pawn.

Rook a8 check -> a7 check -> take black rook w/ check -> black king recaptures on h7 -> push e5 pawn. Black can't catch it before promotion.

Same here. You might like the Stafford gambit for black.

I was never optimistic. As if they'd allow the release of evidence that implicates them in crimes people find most disgusting. Trump can't allow it to be known he's a tweedo because it would be his end. Which is why they'd stop at nothing to prevent this.

This guy has a good idea: Rather than doing random daily puzzles, stick to a set of roughly 100–300 tactical motif puzzles and use spaced-repetition software like Anki to drill them until they become second nature. Eventually, the patterns just show up without conscious processing, like magic. Pattern-recognition takes much longer if just keep doing random puzzles.

The position is probably close to equal if you move rook to e3 because black just moves pawn to d5, not only defending the knight but cutting off white's bishop mobility. You have to take night first then rook e3. Queen can't retreat and protect rook on e8, so you gobble up the cookie and make the chicken run to h7. Then black is down a rook and black's bishop can't come out without losing the other rook and the f7 pawn is weak and the entire position for black has collapsed. Could also calculate the line knight takes knight, sac the bishop on f7 check, queen h5 check. Stopping there because too much calculation but could be something there. Probably not. Black could just decline the sac.

That's only because you know that when you're presented with puzzles like "black to move and win" the solution is almost always counter-intuitive, otherwise it wouldn't make for a good puzzle. So you relied on a heuristic that doesn't exist in real games. Not so easy to find when the clock is ticking and you don't know you have mate in 2.