Chess: Pawn cocktails
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Your support makes all the difference.Problems with only pawns on the board are quite a rarity. The first diagram is probably the earliest example. Composed by Ponziani in 1769, it is White to play and mate in five. (The Q-side pawns bump the number up from four.)
It was almost a hundred years before C Tomlinson came up with the minimalism of the second diagram. This time it is White to play and mate in two.
For a pawn-problem purist, however, promoting a pawn is a blemish, though not as bad as that of a problem by Isidor Gunsberg in 1905. He had a white king on c8, pawn on b5, against black king on a8, pawn on a7. White to play and mate in five. What's wrong with it? Finally a classic by T R Dawson: White to play and mate in 12.
Answers: Ponziani: 1.g3 g6+ 2.Kxf6 g5 3.h3 a3 4.bxa3 g4 5.hxg4. Tomlinson: 1.c8=R Ka6 2.Ra8. Gunsberg: 1.Kc7 a5 2.b6 etc, but the position is impossible: what was Black's last move? Dawson: Ke2-d1-c1-b1-a2-b3, then Kxc3, Kd2- e2-f3, then 11.c4+ and 12.d4 mate.
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