Each day a new puzzle was published at a special web page. One could send the solutions as long as the contest lasted, but I preferred to do it right away. The only exception was problem #4, which took me two days to deal with. I have seen it before, but forgotten what the idea was.
 

It was nice to see the updated standings table in the morning of each day, i.e. the participants' inputs were process exceptionally fast. Kudos to the team of the organizers!
 

Most of all I liked problems #4 and #8, as they can't be solved using a chess engine. These puzzles largely helped distinguish the winners from everyone else. Studies (#9 and #10) were also quite instructive. However, I was confused about the right way of putting down the answers. It was obvious that I should list the most critical lines, but how does one define them? Sometimes I was at a loss which lines are important, and which are not. Is it obvious that this pawn endgame is winning for White, or do I have to provide any more moves? At one occasion I have spent an hour patiently writing down variations only to see my Word editor glitch and lose all the materials. I had to start over and decided to use a Fritz interface this time to avoid getting lost in all those brackets of subvariations. My result - 88 points out of 90 - was obtained in the following way: maximum points for problems #1-8 and 1 point lost on studies #9 and #10.
 

Being an ambitious person, I was actually hoping to win "gold", although finishing in second place (like I did; the winner got 89/90) was also a decent result. More importantly, the contest was a success, and it has given all the participants a great chance to sharpen their chess skills! 

Here are the problems and the solutions:

	1. Written by This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it on 01:26 06 äåêàáðÿ 2011 ã.
	TQMLkFuNSLwcBcCui Good to see a taelnt at work. I can't match that. http://www.google.com/

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