Puzzled by puzzles

Hi,

Sometimes (more often at rating above 2.300) I find a puzzle like this one:

lichess.org/training/6IFlE

------- Spoiler --------
White has to move (down by two pawns), there is this Black Knight forking Queen and Rook, I find an easy way to avoid losing both, but the right answer ends with White down a Rook (even the Knight seems going to survive), and no checkmate in sight.
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I know the position is more important than material, etc... and the main value of the puzzles is being similar to actual games, but I wonder how can one be supposed to evaluate these at my not so high rating, so I get three possible answers:

- rating system is at least weird (but I guess it is calculated just using people that solve it or fails, so it goes down to the following two),
- I'm naturally dumb at asessing positional values, or to put it mildly "not as good as finding tactics",
- people study a lot of positional/strategy and I should be doing the same.

Any thoughts?

I think this puzzle is just a classic case where the most direct and natural moves happen to be right due to much more complex reasons. So people who guess the move get it right decreasing it's rating while people who try to calculate to the end struggle.

Puzzles like this are the ones I give thumbs down. They are terrible at measuring your tactical skill.

I guess the puzzle ends there because after black's next move there would be multiple correct ways to win - which is not supported.

So the question remains: why is the resulting position so great? And I agree, this is not obvious at all. White needs to keep attacking, and the mainline is wild.

I'm not sure that this is in the right forum. But the sequence is correct as every other move loses by force (and can be calculated as such). Once you see that the king is driven into the center and other pieces such as the queen are loose, you can quickly start to see compensation for just going down the exchange. When solving puzzles sometimes it helps to come to logical conclusions by process of elimination.

"I find an easy way to avoid losing both" -- I believe you are considering the desperado on e6, however this does not work tactically as it does not have to be accepted by black, who has a very strong reply instead.

@CoffehCat said in #4:
> ... you can quickly start to see compensation for just going down the exchange ...

The point is, it's an entire rook. You can basically never recapture on f1 without losing the game.

@nadjarostowa said in #3:
> So the question remains: why is the resulting position so great?

I've been looking at it for a while and haven't found a win yet. Clearly the Thing has something in mind...but God knows what it is (that's why I just TD'ed it).

If you can't figure it out yourself then you can look at Stockfish's evaluation of the postion.
That 's what I do. The only annoying thing is with Stockfish it repeats moves a lot.
It avoids 3 move repetition but it seems to like two move repetitions.

@OctoPinky said in #1:
> (even the Knight seems going to survive)
@nadjarostowa said in #5:
> The point is, it's an entire rook. You can basically never recapture on f1 without losing the game.

Not right away, for sure, but you do eventually. For example, 24. Nf7+ Ke7 25. Nd8+ Kd6 26. Qd4+ Ke7 27. Qh4+ Kd6 28. Nf7+ Kd5 29. Kxf1. White is only down the exchange and has an ongoing attack. The position is still complicated, of course.

@pokraise @AsDaGo @MrPushwood @nadjarostowa @CoffehCat @RichardCarpenter :
Thank you for your input. Just to be clear, I have no doubt the evaluation is right, also the advice of following Stockfish line(s) is useful, even if in this particular case I just can't get any clue after 6-8 moves, beyond the general principle "if you can have a safe Rook or Queen on the 7th rank, go for it".

Somehow I'm grateful that other people can't see it clearly, still can't figure out the low rating of this one, but anyway...

@CoffehCat said in #4:
> believe you are considering the desperado on e6

Rather Qf4. Black Queen is hanging and, if exchanged, I recapture with Rook. Of course, still two pawns down, and that goes worse after every exchange.

#9

Ah, yeah. That's just two clean pawns, and dead lost.