Josh and Lloyd Gordon of Toronto have been contributors to The Checker Maven for some while, frequently sending us interesting position from their games and studies. Lately, they've been trying their hand, not at music composition, but at problem composition.

Now, while perhaps they're not yet ready to enter Bill Salot's excellent high-level competitions (see here[1]), they did send along an effort that we found quite interesting. It isn't terribly hard but it's a lot of fun.

BLACK

WHITE
White to Play and Draw

W:W32,31,30,29,28,27,24,23,21,19,17:B18,14,13,12,10,8,7,6,5,3,1.

Are you composed enough to find the solution? Composing a mouse click on Read More will allow you to annotate your opus with the correct solution.

[1] Bill Salot runs frequent thematic composition contests at the link given above. The problems found there are of the highest quality and are richly deserving of your attention.

Solution

30-25---A 13x22 19-16---D 12x26 27-23 18x27 25x2 8-11 31x22 27-31 24-20---B 31-26---C 2-6 26x17 6x8 3x12 21x14 1-6 29-25 6-9 28-24 9x18. Drawn.

A---You might think 30-26 is better but it's a likely loss.

B---Careful! 24-19 loses.

C---1-6 also draws.

D---19-15 might also draw here.

With lots of action and several key moves to find, we'd rate this problem as "quite good"! We hope Josh and Lloyd continue to compose and share their work.