Temposchlucker

Today I quit working on chapter 7 of SOPE. Chapter 7 is about 4-6 pawns at one wing. These problems are far too complicated. So I decided to go back to chapter 2: king+pawn vs king+pawn (inspired by Montse). In an earlier post I complained about the habit of composers to choose the most beautiful and hence the most exotic positions. I will show you what I mean by this. You will be interested in my findings (at least I was:) Have a look at diagram 1, part of a study by Grigoriev, used for explanation by SOPE. diagram 1 White to move and draw. There is only one move for white. The diagram is given with a lot of variants. That is not enough to get a thorough insight of the position. I explored the position with my Nalimov tablebase and this is what I found: diagram 2. White to move and draw. red = white is lost blue = draw green = white wins From this picture it is easy to see why the study of Grigoriev is a special and not a common position. The use of colored zones gives a much more co...

Learning pawn endings is very heavy. There are so much things to learn. I didn't know I knew so little. And that there is so much to know. I comfort myself with the thought that probably only a few people can go the same road, so I will definitely have an edge in the end(ing). In the first place most people think that pawn endings are easy. And when they think it is, they will not put much effort in it. And if in the unlikely case they do, they have to be prepared to work hard during a few months, without getting extra ratingpoints initially. Because only when the knowledge is transformed to skill the reward will come. And probably only after rook endings and other piece endings are mastered too. It's so difficult that I have to take a break every now and then. Then I relax by reading as much information about pawn structures as I can get. I'm almost finished with chapter 6 of SOPE. Only 3 to go for the very basics. And then: repeating, learn by heart, and doing as much paw...

I couldn't find a clear explanation of corresponding squares at the web, so I decided to follow the suggestion of PMD and write my own. The theory is explained in SOPE, but I find it difficult to use it in such theoretical form in OTB play. So I try to make thinks more practical. I develop my own terminology along the way The simplest form of corresponding squares is the opposition. In the next examples white is the attacker, who wants to win and black is the defender, who is happy with a draw. diagram 1. White to move. Black wants to protect his own half of the board. Green = border area Yellow = frontline Not colored = hinterland The attacker has moved his king from the hinterland to the frontline on square 6 (=f4) To prevent white from invasion, black has put his king on the CORRESPONDING SQUARE (=f6). This square gets therefore the same id: 6 Every move of white along the frontline has to be answered by black moving to the corresponding squar...

Both Xtreme tracker and Sitemeter agree: since april 10th 2005 my blog is visited by more than 10,000 unique visitors! It took me 2 weeks to finish chapter 4 of SOPE. Chapter 4 is about a small number of pawns. 2 or 3 mostly. It was very tough, alot of problems took me 5-10 hours or more. Some king moves look very counter intuitive, and I wanted to have the feeling that I could find such moves OTB. I'm afraid I didn't quite succeed. Especially triangulation and corresponding squares are difficult. I understand the principles, but I'm just not able to apply them every time in a correct manner. But I intend to repeat the basic chapters 1-9 a few times, to learn the exercises by heart (spaced repetition and flashguards, remember?) and to do as much exercises with 2-3 pawns and kings as I can find. (Suggestions anyone? I have allready Polgars endgame brick and CET from Convekta) There is a limited amount of fighting methods with few pawns, and I want to know them all by heart. ...

In books about endgames there are always a lot of positions from composers to study. SOPE is no exception. The problem with that is that a composer always tries to generate the most exotic position. Allthough that's good to show the beauty of the game, it's not very helpful if you want to learn the game. For that you have to find the most common positions and analyze them thoroughly. I have done that for you for the following position. diagram 1 White to move and win. To evoke your curiousness I coloured the winning moves for white. All other moves result in a draw. First you have to understand what this position is all about. In order to win white has to conquer the black pawn. To that end you have to know what the keysquares are (see diagram 2) diagram 2 The keysquares are coloured blue. So white has two targets to head for. The only way black can defend the keysquares is by opposition. If white moves to b5 then black has to occupy b7. The same with f5 - f7 and so on. So the ...

If I compare my rating from a year ago with my rating now, there isn't much difference. In spite of training tactics rigourously. The reason I kept on training, was, besides curiousness, the feeling that I was developing a rocket launcher. (Sorry for the exaggerated style of this post, but that's they way it felt.) If the rocket launcher went off during a game, I simply blew my opponent off the board. If I "could come into my own" I crushed them. It only happened seldom that I got a position I could call my own. Playing gambits alone wasn't a garantee for that. My opponent had to cooperate. If he didn't, I tried to force matters. Most of the time I came in time trouble in better position, so I had to accept a draw. The amount of draws with under 25 moves in my games is amazing. Solely because I tried to get the utmost from every move, thus generating time trouble. Whithout getting the position I wanted in time. I tried to solve this by training even more tacti...

Today at the club I had black and played the Icelandic gambit. My opponent declined and I could inflict him with an isolated queen pawn. In stead of forcing matters, I just started to press on the weak pawn. Every tactic I used led to the trading off of more pieces. Playing open positions and the use of tactics is the fastest way to an endgame indeed! There is another advantage of playing endgames. The average length of my games is about 20-25 moves or so. Playing an endgame with 60-75 moves means that my opponent has 3 x as much opportunity to make an error. So if there is a difference in strenght, the chance that this results in a point is 3 times higher. Very interesting! I always felt that I accepted too much draws from weaker opponents. In defending his IQP he made an error indeed which costed him a pawn. The pawn ending was an easy win. From an exercise in SOPE: White to move and win. Calculating long lines is just a matter of knowing the compounding short lines. A few weeks ago,...

The comments of the Knights on my blog are very important to me. With an ICT-background I allways despise "implicit assumptions". In the mean time I perpetrate this crime often myself. But gladly there are allways Knights who are willing to show me the flaws in my reasoning! I had for example the idea that a drawish opening was the fastest way to reach an endgame. But there is no logic behind this implicit assumption, as FunkyFantom showed me with his comment: The best way to increase your odds of reaching endgames is to play people as close to your own rating as possible. He is right, of course. The reason I don't reach endings is because I'm used to play on "bend or break". This means that I take much time to force things. The result is either a crushing win or a draw in better position because of time trouble, or a loss when I'm making a mistake. But the reason I play so forcefully is that I have only one plan: attack the king. There is no plan B. Esp...

I start to see the glimpses that it might be possible to master pawn endings. I'm getting an idea of the tools that are needed for this work. There is of course an enormous amount of work to do, but the notification that it is not impossible is important to me. What works very well is the method of visualisation of long lines with the eyes closed in combination with spaced repetition. SOPE #exercises #repetitions Chapter 1 19 4 Chapter 2 10 3 Chapter 3 10 2 Chapter 4 14 busy Chapter 5 N/A N/A Yesterday I managed for the first time to get a rook ending. I was a pawn up, but alas I was in time trouble so I traded it for a draw.

In comparison to other people of my level, I'm very good at the opening, taking the initiative and starting a king attack. Since the Corus tournament I started to study pawn endgames. That made me realize that the skills as stated above, cover about 30% of the game. I can play very positional, but in my case that means that I can place my pieces well for a kingside attack and know which lines to open to keep the attack going. Very often I hear from my opponent that he underestimated the attack. From the other 70% of the game I have no idea how to play it. I will try to fix that the coming years. I decided to begin at the very end of the game. To learn pawn endings at a reasonable level will take me about 6 month's. In the mean time I want to get an idea about the rest of the game. I have not really an idea what sort of endings belong to the different openings. I guess I have to look at the pawn structure then. Let me try to formulate possible courses for the whole game. Idea...

I feel a bit like King Midas with the touch of gold. Last friday at the club I tried to get an endgame. The games at the club aren't rated, so I use them always to experiment. My opponent had black and played the Caro Kan. Since the Caro Kan is played by guys who want to draw with black and play for a win with white, I thought I had a good chance to get an endgame. But since I'm not used to take much care for my pawns during the opening, he managed to grab one and to infer a double pawn at my queenside. Oh, that greed from those materialistic guys! Can't they leave a pawn alone? So I crushed him in 18 moves since he had forgotten to develop and his king was still in the middle. The same happened a few times at FICS. How on earth can I get an endgame??

Yesterday (and last thursday) I showed you a problem I have trouble with. As you probably not know I'm a little self opinionated:). So if others give me good advice my first reaction is most of the time to think that it's nonsense. But when I continue to struggle then very often I get back to the advice asking myself "what did he actually mean?" The same happened with the advice that Takchess gave me last thursday on my pawn endgame problem. This was (part of) the problem: diagram 1 White to move and draw. Why does 1.Ke7 draw while 1.Kf5 results in mate in 20? The advice of Takchess was: I suppose a way to solve this is to visualize the end position for a draw (there may be multiple options).Then determine what position is one move away from forcing that position. Then determine what position is two moves away from forcing that position. Then repeat as necessary. After rejecting this advice as "nonsense" initially, I read it later carefully again and realiz...

If logic is your guide, life can be a burden sometimes. I want to play better chess. Recent analysis of my games at Corus revealed that endgame study would benefit 44% of my games. So I started endgame study. That's logical. Since I don't want to do a half job, I started with the mother of all endgames: pawn endgames. Because any endgame can only be well-evaluated by the underlying pawn endgame, when all pieces are traded off. That's logical. At this moment I can say I master endgames with only one pawn. So I moved on to endgames with two pawns on the same file. And now I'm lost. I use SOPE, which has a lot of exercises with explanations. Much to my surprise I read in about 25% of the cases that a grandmaster didn't play that specific exercise well in an official game and lost unnecessary. Mind you, we are talking about only two pawns! Take for instance the diagram below. White to move and draw. It is part of the same problem I showed you thursday. Only two moves la...

King of the spill tried to develop a theory about tactics. If such theory will help to improve your chess is another matter, but I see developing theories as a means to clear up the mess that usually resides in the head. A sort of defragmentation of the hard disk so to speak. I have a lot of fragments which are not put together into a consistent theory, but maybe King or others will derive some idea's from it. I divide tactics in two main area's. To win a piece (be it a king or otherwise) from the enemy there are two possibilities. Trap. The first one is the TRAP. Here is only ONE target involved. If you are after a target, it usually escapes after every move you do to attack it. Ad infinitum (=move 50:). Only if the target has a lack of SPACE you have chances to catch it. I consider checkmate as a special case of a TRAP. Duplo attack. The second possibility is the DUPLO ATTACK. I posted about this earlier. I use this name to distinguish it from the term "double attack...

White to move and draw. I spend hours to this problem, but I just don't get it. I can find the line by trial and error but not by reasoning. White has two means to defend: he can try to hunt for the black pawn or he can defend the key squares of the black pawn. But the two pawns are not sitting ducks, they can move whenever suitable. That makes it very confusing. I'm just not able to find a reasoning that can guide the white moves. The plus side on this is: even the simplest situations with only two pawns sometimes are too difficult for grandmasters. So if I master this I can score with it. The downside is that I don't have a clue how to find a reasoning. This is the only line to a draw: 1. Kg5 Ke4 2. Kf6 Kd5 3. Ke7 Kc6 4. Ke6! b6 5. Ke5 Kc5 6. Ke4 Kc4 7. Ke3 b5 8. Kd2 Kb3 9. Kc1 Ka2 10. b4! Kb3 11. Kb1 = Can you find a reasoning to guide white's moves? Only two pawns, how difficult can it be?