8 Queen Puzzles to WIN More Games | ChessKid

Welcome back chess kids to YouTube land and before we get going with a bit of an art project today, make sure you subscribe because you're not going to see me be an artist very often. When I do, you want to know about it. Now what do I mean by art? That's right, look at our chessboard. It's blank. Did I mess up? Is Fun Master Mike crazy in the head today? No, we're going to be artists today. We're not trying to make checkmates or forks or pins or learn about the Reed Lopez. We're going to do a happy fun problem. We're going to try to put eight queens on a blank chessboard so that no two queens are aiming at each other. It's a famous chess puzzle with many solutions, but until you at least try it once, you're not going to know what one of those solutions is. Now, how can you do this on Chess Kid? Well, you can go to chesskid.com slash analysis and then clear the board and put whatever you want on the board. Or if you have a regular chessboard, you can pretend that the pawns were clean since you have eight pawns and try it yourself. So let's just get started. Okay, let's just start putting queens on the board. See how it goes. Let's put this queen here. Very common idea. Put the queen right in the middle of the board. Why not? Okay, no. Okay, now let's put this queen here. So far, no problems. Okay, and I'm going to put a queen here. How are we doing so far? I think we're doing okay. And let's put a queen on... I can't go there. Can't go there. Can't go there. Uh-oh. Oh, I can go here. Did I get it right? I think I got it right. Okay, let's put another queen over here. Okay, so far we have five queens. We have a lot of queens to go. What if we put a queen on this square? Yeah, that works okay. Now it starts to get kind of hard, ChessKids. Let's put a queen on this square. Yeah, okay. Now, when you get down to your final queen, when you've got seven queens on the board like Fun Master Mike does, the eighth queen's the hardest one. And you can already tell whether or not it's going to be possible because, I'm sure you figured out, ChessKids, you have to have one queen per file and one queen per rank. So which file is not represented right now? That's the D file. Okay, so we've got to put a queen in the D file. Know that. And which rank is not represented? Hmm, the second rank. Well, where do those two files and ranks intersect? The D file and D2. And would you look at that? Would you look at that? On my first try. Now, it's not going to be that easy for you, ChessKids. I kind of lucked into this one, but there you go. That's one of the possible solutions. Oftentimes, you will not have a possibility on your eighth queen. You gotta check the diagonals carefully, by the way. Okay, the diagonals are really where this can mess you up sometimes. I think my diagonals are okay. I got this queen on that diagonal. If I can draw straight lines, I can show you. This queen's here. This queen's here. I don't see the queens intersecting. I think we're okay. Now, let's try it again. There is one that I usually have memorized. Let's put a queen here, a queen here, a queen here. Notice those queens are all a knight's jump away. That's not exactly required, but it's often very helpful for this puzzle. Now, I'm going to put a queen here. I'm going to put another queen here, another queen here. Okay, and then if I put this queen here and this queen here. Wow, I'm not using notes. I'm just getting a little bit lucky today. Okay, all of the queens are connected by a knight's jump over here, and then all of these queens are connected by a knight's jump. Now, here comes the crazy thing. Chess kids, I want you to be really careful before doing this, but if you were to pick up your computer. What's that? You're a chess kid and you're watching on your phone. Okay, you can do it on your phone or your tablet. If you were to turn it upside down, it would be the exact same position. That's right. Turn your phone upside down. It's the exact same position. Now, I guess the queens might be upside down, or if you have that gyroscope in your phone, it's probably going to reorient the board and mess everything up. So, go into your settings, lock your screen, then turn it upside down. I don't know what kind of phone you're on, but I think you get the point. The absolute opposite of A5 is actually H4. It's the complete opposite, the mirror image square, the contrapositive. I'm using too many good words. Now, I'm not saying that your solutions will come as easy as mine. It's a really fun problem that you can teach to anybody if they know how the queen moves. See if you can get the eight queens puzzle right, and most importantly, see if you can get a different chess answer than Funmaster Mike has. I bet you can. Good luck solving, chess kids, and I hope you enjoy it.