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Meanwhile, black to move. Force mate in three.
NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.
Interested in learning? Try THIS.
In chessy news, in St Louis the 9LX continues. It has been a lot of fun watching the players. 9LX or Fischer Random is a chess variant where the pieces start in randomized along the first rank, provided that the bishops are on different colors and castling is possible. There are 960 possible positions. The player can’t do long prep. The tournament format is a 10-player round-robin, with a time control of 20 minutes per side plus a 5-second increment added every move.
This is not for ELO so they are really interacting as they receive the set ups for the next game, sitting and standing around boards, debating. Then the games start and there is real pressure from the clock. Eventually as pieces clear, it turns into “standard chess”. Until then it is pretty hairy. Fischer Random really puts juice back into the fruit. Levon Aronian and Sam Sevian were leading after day 2. Fabi, Wesley and Sam are a point behind. It has been great watching Garry Kasparov play. Intense guy.
St. Louis Chess Club has some good photos.
Kasparov look at an opening set up with my guy Wesley So and Hikaru Nakamura.
Getting ready, looking at the set up. Left to right, Sam Sevian, Sam Shankland, Ray Robson, Wesley So, Jeffrey Xiong.
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Gazing on a painting such as shown, how could one not want to be on the side of light?
Getting ready for Michaelmas… (I was discussing that, with the schola master, after Mass today, before seeing this…) I see there is a book entitled Saint Michael and the Angels: A Month with St. Michael and the Holy Angels Compiled from Approved Sources (1983); and I suspect one could easily spend a month studying the paintings alone, to which Wikipedia devotes special St. Michael categories: but trying to find this one quite defeated my attempts to range through them! And what a fascinating one – the sword scarcely more than a poniard (precise economy of means?), the dragon under the left arm, the three variously claw-like hands, (if I am not mistaken) desperately grabbing the edge of the shattered and descending piece of pavement (or something of the sort: the floor of Heaven?), the strange big-headed bat-form in the shadow to their left (our right), the no longer fully white tattered wing seeming to transform from feathery to webbed, and what is that on Lucifer’s right leg – a more-impeding (real-world?) variant of ball and chain? And all the intriguing details of light and shade! A good study of its relation to traditional iconography would be something worth reading.