Underpromotion Milestones

Pawn underpromotions do not happen often in practical games, but they have been an important topic in study composition more than a hundred years. Recently, the famous Babson task (Black promotes to one of the four possible pieces and White must promote to the same piece in all four cases to win) has been conquered by Gady Costeff in an endgame study. Many thought it to be impossible to realize this extremely difficult task. In this first part of the three part series Harold van der Heijden describes the beginning of the story with the first underpromotions including the famous Allumwandlung.