Temposchlucker

The promotion problems at Chess Tempo aren't the casual promotions that occur in your average endgame study. The promotion forms an integral part of the tactical combination at hand. The promotion usually immobilizes the enemy because his pieces are bound to stop the pawn. This series of posts is intended to investigate how the promotion helps to make a combination possible. Have a look at the following diagram: Black to move 1R6/P2R2kp/6p1/8/8/5p1b/r6P/7K b - - 0 1 [ solution ] Feel free to comment already. I will update this post later.

While analysing my failures at Chess Tempo, I noticed three areas of improvement for me: initiative mate promotion I have  made some serious progress in unearthing a few important scenarios considering the initiative. It only needs practising now. I have developed a nice picture which covers all scenarios around mate: Chase the king into the box Chase the king onto a line of attack Plug the hole in the box so the king can't skedaddle Squeeze the box Pry the box about by the weakest defender Add attackers Cut off defenders The scheme lacks practical testing, as of yet. And I have avoided ideas about promotion so far. It is difficult to choose which subject to devote my attention to, since when I train one of them, I get frustrated by being pummeled by the other two. So I simply start with promotion, and see to which it leads. And when I want to change the subject of study, I simply change it without further ado.   Promotion Takchess gave us some random