Ashley’s “Pawn Mower” Puzzle Debuts!
Grandmaster Maurice Ashley is known for many things in chess, but he continues to add on superlatives in his 30-year career. Lately he has used his patent of “pawn mower” a concept derived from an exercise he featured in his CD “Maurice Ashley Teaches Chess.” This concept has now made a debut in the Richmond Times on the puzzle page along with the crossword and sudoki teasers.
The 1995 CD had a number of useful learning guides and perhaps pawn mower is one of the most entertaining since it may remind one of a video game. Remember Pac-Mac rage of the 1980s? While Pac-Mac’s vertical and horizontal dance would be tame by today’s gaming standards, pawn mower is a chess variant that challenges the players to capture all the pawns with a rook on a continuous path. The exercise is fun and also test visualization since you must plot the course of the rook before moving. Ashley told The Chess Drum that the puzzle debuted in the Richmond Times on July 23rd. Perhaps the concept can receive syndication in newspapers around the country.
Look forward to seeing more puzzles!
His Chessbase Dvd will debut soon: The secret to Chess.
https://www.chessbase.com/shop/product.asp?pid=521
Thanks Robert! I hope to get a review copy of it. I believe his pending return to active chess would help this project tremendously.
… well GM Ashley was rated 2600 and i 2300 during our blitz match back in 95 but “the secret” i had was the fact that i played Ultramodern Chess and Ashley played the Traditional stuff like Kasparov and da boys, so i got a successful result because i used a faster and more accurate science ,not that i was necessarily stronger than him as UM sure most traditional thinking players would believe based on their competitive results, they try to base errthing on their tournaments and federations but chess was here sine long ago ,and they have attempted to imply that people of African descent have no real contributions in chess, but now they wanna be quiet and go in the back room and try to learn something on the slide! (latisha thats old school! ),they now realize they dont know every person of AFRICAN DESCENT!!!, now they may try to superimpose themselve upon us, sayin we got this “new” and we got that “new” on their different sites,i think they got some robots playin on chessbomb tryin to reprogram their machines i think they callin one of them Houdini, then they banned the ULTRAMODERNIST from their site, maybe Um exposin too much to the BIG THREE!!!(Big-Ups Woody) , maybe, just maybe they have FEAR, maybe they dont want people to know they aint no SUPAGENIUSES . Besides, this is the United States so you should already know u aint gunna never dominate ,especially now, just look at the 92 DREAM TEAM, Magic, Bird and Jordan- The BIG THREE. Maurice, thanks and nice dvd UM sure Anand happy too, besides its a simple thing to come to the Chessdrum learn something new then take a look over at the White House and move a knight. Its not rocket science or some big “secret” , UM actually shocked Topy wasnt prepared since its so obvious. Oh chessbase i almost forgot we dont have any “secrets” in ULTRAMODERNISM we use TRANSPARENCY, (Elizabeth- wink wink), oh yeah, the pen mighter than the sword. HI Diamond daughter of Abdul Shakoor , You the best MAMA!!! Peace.