Bad, even very bad chess moves are nothing out of the ordinary. Every single player will have had their fair share of stupid blunders like hanging a queen in an otherwise completely winning position. But it is pretty rare to see examples of the worst possible type of blunder:
Lets say that a chess move is (truly) atrocious if
- it forces the opponent to give checkmate the following move and
- every other legal move from the same position would give checkmate instead.
For example:
In this position, White has exactly two legal moves - Bxc6# (which is checkmate) and Qb7+???, which forces Black to respond with Qxb7#, checkmating White. So, the second option would be an example of a (truly) atrocious move.
Now, in this instance, there was only a single alternative move that White could have played. But clearly, a (truly) atrocious move grows all the more impressive the larger its set of alternatives is. So this is your challenge:
Try to find a legal chess position that admits a (truly) atrocious move with the most alternatives!
To kick things off, here is my (nonoptimal) benchmark of a (truly) atrocious move with 21 alternatives (White to move):
Can you beat that? I'm looking forward to your attempts :^)





K1k1BR2/P1p1P3/2q5/8/1Q6/8/8/8 w - - 0 1FEN (second position):2k3BR/2P4P/1PPP4/5R2/8/pp4pB/1p4P1/bK6 w - - 0 1$\endgroup$