The finish of the 6th game of the World Championship match between Ding Liren and Ian Nepomniachtchi was impressive. In a tense and complicated position, Ding surprisingly advanced his d-pawn, and this small pawn advance was crucial to a spectacular mate that could have occurred in the game. The audience was impressed, the study composers were inspired. In his last "Study of the Month" column Siegfried Hornecker had a look at "Ding's Theme" in studies, in his current column he returns to this theme with further insights. | Photo: Ding Liren | Photo: Amruta Mokal
This month, I planned to write about chess composition in Japan, but it turned out that not much information was obtainable. The situation in Singapore is even worse regarding sources. So instead, in this month's column we have a small mix of shorter articles again. | Photo: Pixabay
Polarchy or Polyarchy is the idea to have the burden of government on the shoulders of multiple people, as opposed to the monarchy that only sees one king or queen with all the burden. In chess, the king remains the sole objective of the game, but in rare cases one might be faced with the constellation that said king is joined not only by one but two queens. | Photo: Pixabay
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Study of the Month: February 2021
Although many other endgame study composers created pawn endgames, two were outstanding. I wrote an extensive article on Nikolay Grigoriev in April 2018, based on the research of Sergey N. Tkachenko. The same researcher’s writing also provides valuable insight into the life of the other pawn-endgame master, Mikhail Zinar.
There are small joys that I look forward to when receiving magazines, and one of those joys was to browse for endgame studies by Mikhail Zinar. His ever-interesting ideas, his incredible mastery of pawn endgames, and his ease to create task problems (we will look at those next month) made his endgame studies always worth replaying in my head. Sometimes it would just be a slight smile at recognizing a familiar idea, sometimes it would be astonishment at an outrageous construction (in the good sense of the words).