Cavalier Chess

Mating Problems

For Christmas 1998 I got a book by Laszlo Polgar with over 5000 Chess problems, mostly mating problems. Taking this book as my inspiration, I have begun on a similar collection of mating problems for Cavalier Chess. Some are from actual games, and most were created from scratch. Those I created from scratch are fairly simple and repititious. The purpose behind this is to systematically teach different kinds of basic mating techniques through repeated examples. As this collection grows, it will come to include more complex problems and eventually mate-in-two problems. There are over fifty problems right now.

I originally used GIF files for displaying the problems. This created a big problem when I wanted to update the board colors and the Nightrider images. So I wrote down all the positions, then wrote a Perl script to convert each diagram into an HTML table. Each diagram is now an HTML table with square colors controlled by a style sheet. This makes it much easier for me to update graphics for the diagrams, and it drastically cuts down on bandwith, while also increasing the speed at which you can download diagrams from my website. The one drawback to doing it this way is that you now need a web browser which understand style sheets. But if you play Cavalier Chess, you probably have Zillions of Games. If you have that, you have Windows 95, and if you have Windows 95, you should have at least version 4.0 of Internet Explorer. So most players of Cavalier Chess will have the appropriate browser. If you have the latest version of either Netscape or Internet Explorer, you should be able to view the diagrams accurately. Although I normally prefer to write pages accessible with any browser, for these pages I'm just going to say "Best viewed with Netscape or Internet Explorer."

Begin with Problem #1 and put a bookmark whereever you leave off and want to continue.


This page was made and written by Fergus Duniho, creator of Cavalier Chess.