# Great chess puzzle **URL:** \ **Category:** The Game Room\ **Tags:** board-card-word-game, chess\ **Created:** [April 14, 2021, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-chess-puzzle/940000 "2021-04-14T20:47:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Railer13](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/railer13/32/9742_2.png) [@Railer13](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Railer13)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2021, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-chess-puzzle/940000/1 "2021-04-14T20:47:23Z")
Apologies if this has already been discussed on the Dope. I haven’t seen it, so here goes. This chess puzzle has been around since 1987, so I’m sure @glee and others have seen it. I just saw it today for the first time. In this video, grandmaster and current world champion Magnus Carlsen discusses and analyzes the moves necessary to win the game. I found it fascinating. Actual discussion of the play starts at about the five minute mark. [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/8wCJalNkTEI/maxresdefault.jpg "Grandmasters and Engines Couldn't Solve This Puzzle. Then Came The Magician") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wCJalNkTEI) ---
**Author:** ![Dead\_Cat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9fc29f/32.png) [@Dead\_Cat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dead_Cat)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2021, 8:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-chess-puzzle/940000/2 "2021-04-15T08:41:30Z")
Nice one - I know the channel (it’s a good one) but hadn’t seen this puzzle before. One thing I particularly liked about it was that white underpromoting to a knight on d8 (to prevent the knight fork on f7) doesn’t work as black still has too much material, but in the actual solution (which I came nowhere near to finding - if someone tells me that Tal struggled with it, I’m not going to lose sleep over missing it myself!) black is forced to underpromote to a knight twice to stave off mate - temporarily, of course.