Spot the Move! #3

Another year of the Crazyhouse World Championship, the pinnacle of the game, and another player marked on lichess.org for presumed engine use in a match against littleplotkin (in 2018 it was HighContrast, in 2020 BughouseMaster). But in the spirit of taking the good from the bad, here is a sequence of ten puzzles from the 2021 CWC campaign of luvlyx, now marked on lichess.org.

Note, that while some of these moves might have been suspiciously good discoveries, there is no suggestion that it was these positions or on this particular evidence that Lichess reached their verdict. On that, no-one will ever know. Lichess has its own methods for reaching its conclusions and this evidence is kept private to prevent cheats using it to avoid detection in future.

The purpose is rather so that we can learn and become better players ourselves. After the puzzles is a video review of the games from which they came. In each of the following positions, it’s the pieces on your side of the board to play and you are tasked with finding the best next move! A solution key is at the bottom of the blog.

Video Review of the games

Solution Key:

1. Kg7               2. Ke7

 3. Qxe7             4. Qh5

    5. N@d4           6. B@g4

     7. B@g5           8. N@h4

     9. N@f5          10. N@d2

—okei