How can it be a draw? December 30, 2001

White has a king, a queen and two pawns
against Black's bare king. It is White to move.
White is not stalemated. And still White cannot win.

Here is a position that fulfils the conditions. White to play cannot do anything about the stalemated black king. The game is a draw.

We received a number of solutions with the above position (or reflected on the left side of the board). It would therefore seem that this is a unique solution.

When the problem was originally proposed by John Nunn a chess player named Jens Späth of Tostedt, Germany, noticed that you can even add a few queens to the above position.

Here, too, with White to move the position is a draw.

Out of curiosity I asked you to think about how much material White can have against the bare black king, be on the move and still not be able to win (once again without White being stalemated). There are many ways to do it with a full white force. Joshua Green of Arizona sent me the following position:

Josh writes: "Any white move stalemates Black, so White cannot win. Black’s last move was Kb1-a1 and White’s last move was, say, Bd3xPc2+. Black’s previous moves consisted of moving his king back and forth between a1 and b1 while White calmly promoted his pawns and moved his pieces to their current squares. With this idea, it is easy to construct a proof game, so the position is legal. This is clearly the maximum possible material difference."

Frederic Friedel