MESON Chess Problem Database

Welcome to the MESON Chess Problem Database, currently holding 254,683 problems.

MESON is a database of composed chess problems. You will not find any game positions here! The problems in MESON are all directmates in 2, 3, 4 and 5 moves – that is of the ‘White to play and mate in n moves’ variety.

On this website you will be able to search for problems using different criteria, including composer, year(s) published, king positions, material balance, source, quoter, stipulation, soundness and by the positions of pieces in the diagram. You will also be able to search by Problem ID (PID). Lists of anticipations are available as are lists of the books and magazines from which I have abstracted the problems in MESON. There are also various statistics available. Find more information about MESONand its history by selecting the items in the Help item in the menu to the left. Apart from HELP buttons on a couple of pages, I have not provided any further guidance. If you feel more is needed, please contact me and tell me what further help is required.

To avoid slow responses, output from the general search facility is limited to the first 1500 problems found. This limitation is not present when selecting All composers, All Sources/Quoters and any selection from lists of composers/sources/quoters. Such ouput can often consist of thousands of records and response times will depend on the speed of your network, the speed of your device and the memory capacity of your device.

Please do read the About page. That explains exactly what type of problem is included in MESON, how they are presented and from whence they are derived.

There will be errors in MESON – those I have copied from books, magazines and the card collections I have access to, those I have copied from the other free online databases and those I have perpetrated myself. If you find an error, do contact me about it, quoting the problem ids (PIDs).

I can be contacted via the BCPS Website.