Gems, poetry, clockwork

When you've had your fill (for the next hour) of the sloppiness and adrenaline of the battlefield, take a few moments to recharge your chess batteries and rekindle your love for the poetry of the game with these gifts from Caïssa.

Background

I learned chess from my father and I never looked back. Along the journey, I fell under the spell of chess problems. Not tactical problems drawn from actual games, but rather carefully constructed compositions that ruthlessly eliminate anything extraneous to the ideas being explored. Every good player knows that training on such compositions significantly sharpens one's chess intelligence. They also bring one back again to contemplate—in a relaxed and pure environment—the many facets of the game's beauty.

Andrew Soltis used to publish chess problems in his chess column in the New York Post. I loved solving them and sending in the solutions under made-up comical names, which he dutifully published. I suppose those were my first steps down the road to becoming a problem proselytizer. Eventually, I ran a chess problem corner in my local newspaper for years. (In the United States, there was a time when every newspaper had a chess column. Those have vanished. Perhaps mine was the very last print problem column.) Over twenty years ago, I started a bulletin board dedicated to these gems of chess clockwork.

Plan

I shall periodically post new problems. You can try to solve them or simply work through the solutions straightaway. (Feel free to add your thoughts at the associated forum topic.) May these gems lift your spirits!