Daily Puzzle:
How is this 2156?
Isn't it quite obvious that you have to avoid a stalemate?
+ king in the corner + you need to promote
Have you failed this or consider it to be challenging?
Puzzle rating is not set by someone, it is determined by people solving it or failing to. So if a puzzle has (relatively) high rating, it just means that people are not so successful at solving it. (BtW, when I did it around midnight, it was rated something like 2030, IIRC.)
This one (#daQel) in particular is a bit tricky. The first move is quite obvious but if you are not careful, it's easy to fall for a trap in second (and I don't mean the trivial immediate stalemate) which is what happened to me. I suspect I wasn't the only one. (I'm not specific as I want to avoid spoilers.)
Ahoj Kubecek,
I am aware that those ratings are not assigned manually. (i.e. automatically by failure rate of users)
Nevertheless I was a little bit surprised - would have expected it to me more like 1500s.
Everyone thinks different and looks at patterns differently. So maybe that puzzle just suited me.
I think there is no harm in telling your thought process (i mean i already gave a few hints in my post). There are enough puzzles - spoiling impossible.
And thx for mentiong the right puzzle #. Seems I forgot to link it. There you go:
lichess.org/training/daQelOK, it's no longer the daily puzzle, after all. As I said, the first move, 56. Kc2 g5 (forced) is rather obvious. I didn't fall for the obvious trap (fxg5 with an immediate stalemate) but I fell for the less obvious: that after 57. f5, black does not have to take but can just play 57. ... g4, forcing me to choose between a stalemate and letting him promote. So I calculated everything down to the end, checked that whether black promotes on g1 or h1 (and whatever he promotes to), there is no way to avert the checkmate (only delay by one move) but I missed that one "little" detail.
Once I was told that 57. f5 was wrong, I saw quickly why and what was the right move (the idea was exactly the same after all) but that was too late. Lesson learned (hopefully), it cost me 52 points of puzzle rating...
