Here’s a little mate in 2, as black I came across in a recent game of mine. What’s interesting is that it’s mate in 2 regardless of who moves first. That’s why I posted it. Otherwise, it not the type of mate problem that would be worthy of posting here.
If white moved first, it would be on par with the first mate-in-2 a rank beginner might see in a book for rank beginners.
If black moves first, it’s only slightly harder.
I did swindle my opponent by “giving” away my bishop. ![:smiling_imp: :smiling_imp:](/images/emoji/twitter/smiling_imp.png?v=12)
I’m not going to post the score since in this case, a bit of mystery on how the position came up seems appropriate.
Please don’t post the answer. It’s not a hard problem.
![](http://www.jinchess.com/chessboard/?p=r--r--k---p--p-ppp----p-----------P-B-q---------PQ-R-PPP---R--K-&tm=b)
Nice! I had to look at the diagram to figure out whether you meant “whoever moves first mates in 2” or “regardless of who moves first, white [ or black ] mates in 2”.
Bill Smythe
It’s the sort of problem that one might come across, but labeled “black defends”, and let it up to the player to figure out that the best defense against white impending mate is to just mate first.
I thought about it when I woke up, but had too much to do to even have time to see if anybody had posted a reply. (Locking out the edit function).
The problem is easy enough so that nobody would want to post a solution, even if you had not asked them not to.
It’s a good black-mates-in-two problem for the sub-1600 crowd.
Bill Smythe