The Two-Move Chess Problem

Mate-in-two-move problems are a popular category within chess problems, typically because it is possible to solve them without jumping through too many hoops. That, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean that they are all simple or easy to solve, in fact, far from it! Although I have solved, or least tried, to for more than forty years I never truly understood the inner workings behind these problems until I started reading this book which is wonderfully thorough in its breakdown of all elements that go into the composition of problems and what makes good problems and not so good ones. The author of this work was B. G. (Benjamin Glover) Laws (1861-1931) who was elected the first president of The British Chess Problem Society, the world’s oldest chess problem organization.