Premoving

Yes, this blogpost was inspired by chess.com. And the brilliant idea of play 1 0 games.

So firstly, for those who don't know, 1 0 games means each person gets 1 minute at the start, and per move, he gets 0 seconds increment. In short, the player has to make about 40 moves in one minute. How fun.

The problem is then not how to get into a winning position (just think for 5 seconds a move and you'll thrash... for a while, and then you get into a horrible mess of time trouble), but rather how to get into a winning position fast, and how to win even faster from there.

It sounds like nonsense, but the fact is you can win a Queen+pawns versus approximately equal number of pawns endgame in about 10 seconds usually. (The trick is promoting 2 queens and checking until your opponent cries... and usually times out). So that is joyful to the 1 0 player.

To make the spam even more enjoyable, there is something called premove (terminology from a certain ELO rated 2000+- player) on chess.com. This means that you are allowed to make a move before your opponent makes him, and effectively takes 0 seconds to move, but the drawback is that it sometimes results in you doing stupid stuff. Eg. You have a brilliant tactic where you win a knight. You expect your opponent to minimise losses and play something like Nxh5. Hence, you set your promove to Bxh5. And then he brilliantly sacrifices a queen with something like Qa4. And the premove triggers. And instead your queen hangs.

However, premoves are epically important, like when you're 1 queen 2 rooks, 3 bishops, 4 knights up and have 1 second left (hey its possible!). A person not accustomed to premoves may randomly check about 3 times and run out of time. What a sad way to lose a game.

This is where premove skills come in. And to improve on premoving skills... you guessed it. Premoving puzzles!

I must admit, I totally fail at puzzle creation, but try to bear with me. I try to keep the blogpost interesting, not the puzzles (once again, I admit I fail at creating puzzles). So off to explain the rules.

1) You must move before your opponent's move finishes. Which means you must play a move such that no matter what he does, your move will be winning.
2) You know all of your opponents moves up to 1 move before. Eg.:

e4 ? premove: d4

Then it turns out he played e5. The server recognises you premoved and moves d4 for you. Now the situation becomes
e4 e5 d4 ? Premove: enter your move here.

My point? That you know your opponent's last move at every instance. Hence, a puzzle may have more than one line (but bah! I'm not that skillful).

3) Special puzzles may have special rules. Especially one that says something like: time for one move

What does that mean? It means for example you have 1 move of moving time, which you can use anywhere to RESPOND to your opponent's moves. This also happens when your condition move fails. eg:

1. e4 ? Premove: e5

and your opponent plays e5. Tada! Illegal move. You just wasted your one move of time.

So let's not randomly delay and move on to our first puzzle: a generic endgame: queen+king vs king.

Puzzle 2:

XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXKX
XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXP
PXXXKXXX
XXXXXXXX

cyan to move and win (is that called cyan?)

Puzzle 3:

RNBXXBXR
PPPRX XPP
XXXXPXKX
XBXXXXXX
XXXXXXPX
XXNPXNXP
PPPXXPXX
XXBKXXXR

cyan to move and win (I'm hoping this works)

Edit: Blah! It doesn't at all. I fail.