Thursday, February 23, 2006

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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.

I did some research and found the following statistics in a database with 1,600,000 quality games.

3% pawn endings
1.5% knight vs knight
3% bishop vs bishop (48% draw)
3% bishop vs knight (35% draw)
32% rook vs rook (40% draw)

So it looks a bit silly to put so much effort in pawn endings, but it is the basis for all other endgames. Since you always have to know whether it is favourable to trade the last pieces.
It is clear that after pawn endings I'm going to study rook endgames.
I'm allready trying to steer my middlegames towards rook endings and the last 5 games I managed to get them 2 times on the board. It's a pity I don't know what to do with them, yet:)

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