Puzzle 1: Chess. The position on the chessboard below was reached in the second game of the World Championship Candidates match in 1971 between the American grandmaster Bobby Fischer playing white, ...

Most zugzwang positions aren’t reciprocal like this one. Usually only one side is caught in this kind of bind. Since the term “zugzwang” comes from chess, let’s start with a chess puzzle. Below is a ...

There is a situation in chess called zugzwang in which any legal move leaves the player worse off (in other words, he’d be better off to pass his turn). O… ...

However, the above position is of mutual Zugzwang! This means that if it were Black’s turn to move, he would lose, while White would be forced to settle for a draw if it were White’s turn to move.

"Zugzwang," Ronan Bennett's sixth novel, opens in a St. Petersburg suffused with violence. It is 1914; Bolsheviks, Polish terrorists and pro-German authoritarians all jockey for control of the ...