Welcome to this active site. Each week I am going to present to you an endgame position for you to solve or to workout the best continuation. Computer analysis will also be considered. Some of these positions will come from actual historical games. Others will be composed endgame studies, but all the solutions will be relevant to the practical game. The new position will occur each SUNDAY and I will always be pleased to receive POSITIVE feedback about the positions and the analysis and I will try to acknowledge these where relevant.

French Endgame Study Composer. A contemporary of the better known French composer, Rink. Composed over 300 studies but many have never been published.

This study gained first prize in a study tourney in 1923 but many years later it was found to be unsound. The flaw was discovered by Ilya Maizelis in 1956, the world famous endgame expert, who had worked with Averbakh in the 1950s. He showed that by a remarkable piece of analysis Black could in fact win. Your editor had forgotten about this discovery until only a few days ago after a belated literature search. ( The Encyclopaedia of Chess by Anne Sunnucks. 1976 ) I apologize for any inconvenience caused. In the following analysis the composer's solution is given as the main line and Maizelis' refutation is shown in red. I hope you will agree with me that the flawed study is still a wonderful creation of art which only just fails.

The Knight is pinned and the Rook and Bishop can move back and forth with no progress being made. It is a positional draw. If the Knight is given up a theoretical drawn ending of K+B vs K+R is reached.

1. Cumulative 2003 Prizes: 1st £100 or equivalent, 2nd £50, 3rd £30; 4th £20. (Total Prize Money=£200) Entries limited to 20 solvers. This event will run from 5/1/2003 to 22/12/2003 with a recess in July. Present rules apply but note the prizes will go to those participants who climb the ladder the greatest number of times during the year. The relative position of the solver's name on the ladder will decide the allocation of prizes.