When voting you have to make a choice. It's often (though not always) between two viable candidates. There are of course endless situations in life that require making a choice. Sometimes there are many options, some times just one or two. We make choices in checkers, too, among various possible moves. This column has the title "Tinsley's Choice" for reasons that will soon become apparent.

Today's problem derives from a position that occurred in the 1956 U.S. National tournament in a game played by the great Marion Tinsley against one A. Cameron. You won't be surprised to hear that Dr. Tinsley won the game, but you may be surprised at just how he won. First let's look at the run-up to the critical position.

Loses. 10-6 would hold the draw.

WHITE

BLACK
Black to Play and Win

B:WK5,20,21,23,31:B6,10,11,12,13,K25

At this juncture you might or might not be surprised to hear that there are just two Black moves which lead to a win (if we told you why we'd give too much away). We would of course expect Black, being a piece up, to have the win. However one move leads to a longer win while another move leads to a snappy finish. Which one do you think Dr. Tinsley played? Can you find both of them and show the winning lines of play?

The answers may surprise you. See how you do and then click on Read More to see the solutions and to find out what actually happened over the board.

Solutions

Here's the action-packed snappy win.

Black Wins.

But quite surprisingly (to us at least) Dr. Tinsley played the alternate, longer line.

Black Wins.

This fascinating game appears courtesy of the Checker Cruncher website, where it appears as Problem #13435. We hope you found it as interesting as we did.