Position of the Week

Chess @ 4 is a series of tournaments that Kids Unlimited have been running on the Tornelo platform since April when Australia went into lockdown making online chess the only way to keep in practice. Since the start I've run most of the tournaments, and seen thousands of games. I've seen lots of regular checkmates, tactics, and endgames, some interesting strategies, and some unusual ideas. But this week I saw one of the most unusual positions of all!

This was the final position in a game this week with Michael Iurovetski playing White. It's an incredible checkmate delivered by the knight on h5, which is already an unusual type of mate. But there are another two knights also on the h-file! Remember, knights don't like the edge of the board, they prefer the centre. So do most of the other pieces, but every piece (except Black's king) is sat on an edge of the board. If it was just a couple of pieces, I could understand, but I'm not sure I've seen a position where so many pieces were on an edge, eight pieces in total if White's king isn't included!
​White has obviously built a big lead in material and you can see how here.