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Ken Cox wrote on Wed, Oct 5, 2005 05:11 PM UTC:Good ★★★★

I'm pretty sure that Martin Gardner, in one of his Scientific American 'Mathematical Games' columns, provides a forced win for the non-maharaja player. This column was collected in one of his books.

The winning method involves advancing the pawns and pieces in a sequence such that the safe spaces for the maharaja are whittled down. At every step all pawns and pieces are protected, so the maharaja can't make any captures - nor can it ever check the king.

For example, the sequence started by pushing the h-pawn down the board to the seventh rank. The pawn can't be captured, since the rook will take the maharaja. The maharaja can't first take the rook, since any position from which it could do so is protected. When the pawn advance is done, the whole of the h-column (except h8) is unavailable to the maharaja. You don't know just where it is, but it's not on one of those spaces.

This continued for about 30 moves, and at the end of that sequence, the maharaja could only be safely standing on three or four spaces. For each such space, there was then a further sequence of two or three moves that would capture the maharaja.


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