GG Petrova

Elena Petrova composes chess endgame studies in Kazan, award-winning ones judged by grandmasters, after thirty years teaching mathematics. She came to this expecting chaos and found structure instead, to her open delight. At the end of every match she sends a position: not from the game, a composed one, four or five checkers, with a single question and no answer attached, and then she waits. Some people reply within the hour. Some have never replied at all, and she sends the next one anyway. She has kept every response since 2019 in a folder arranged by how long it took. The folder now runs to several hundred and she has never once said whether the reply itself was correct.