Gady Costeff
Open-knowledge reference entry
Gady Costeff (born July 5, 1961 in Be’er Sheva, Israel) is an Israeli-American chess composer.
Chess composition career
Costeff composed more than 100 endgame studies in his career. He also composed about 30 problems, often collaborating with Ofer Comay and Paz Einat. He was granted the title of FIDE International Master of Chess Composition in 2008. He also served as editor/director of EG, a magazine exclusively devoted to endgame studies, where he oversaw and contributed analytical content for many years.
Costeff is known in the chess composition community for his tendency to research tasks in endgame studies. He worked intensively throughout his career on the achievement of the Babson task in an endgame study, first achieving partial results (3/4 of the theme) in 1981, then achieving a complete Babson task in 2011, but in illegal position. The position was kept secret for over a decade, trying to find a correction, until Costeff decided to publish it on EG n. 238 in October 2024, due to the apparent impossibility of correcting the scheme.
Costeff declared on his editorial: "The position is unreachable by a single capture.
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