About

Advent of Chess is an advent calendar by Offerspill, Norway's biggest chess club with World Champion Magnus Carlsen as founder and chairman. The club is open to anyone, and we host weekly tournaments online. For more information about the club and how to join, see our registration page.

Every day until Christmas, you will be able to open a door to reveal a chess problem. Each correctly answered problem is awarded one ticket in the drawing for a chess board signed by Magnus Carlsen!

The problems in the calendar won't be the usual chess problems you'd find in a book of chess puzzles. Instead of finding the best move, you'll get problems where you need to find out which moves have been played in the past, or the sequence of moves that lead to a certain position. You'll find unorthodox problems like helpmates, selfmates, and retrograde analysis problems, but no "Mate in 2" or "White to play and win"!

How to participate

You need an account to submit answers. Register here. You're only allowed to have one account. Submitting answers with multiple accounts may lead to all your accounts being banned from participating.

When logged in, you'll be able to submit answers behind each door. Each door is open for 24 hours, meaning that you can submit answers for Day 1 from midnight, December 1st until midnight, December 2nd (CET). The answer is published after submissions close.

Chess problem conventions

En passant: En passant is considered illegal unless it can be proven that the only possible last move was a double-step by the pawn in question

Castling: Castling is assumed to be legal unless there is proof that either the king or rook has moved previously.

Chess notation

Most problems should be answered with a sequence of chess moves. For these problems, you need to write the answers using algebraic chess notation.

A way of obtaining the chess notation without having to type it out is setting up the position on the analysis board on Lichess. The chess notation will then appear in the PGN field below the board.

Since most of the puzzles don't start from the initial position, you need to first set up the position using the board editor.

After you've set up the correct position, you can click "Analysis board" and carry out the moves.

Contact us

Come say hi in our Discord server, we have an #adventofchess channel!