Fiddling with Silman

 After my previous tournament in December, I wrote a post about in which areas I still suck . Endgames, preparation of the assault and the opening. I pretty much solved my openings. About the preparation of the assault I had  a revelation a few weeks before my tournament in July.

Yesterday, I decided that endgames must be my next goal (finally). I lost 2.5 points in the endgame in just 7 rounds. I adopt the suggestion of Robert and will use Silman's endgame course as the base.

When I see an endgame position, usually my mind goes blank. Somehow the triggers don't fire. I had a good experience while exploring an endgame a few months ago. After just a few hours, I discovered already a few concepts that are more generally applicable. Even better, the discovery of the invasion in the endgame was the indirect cause of my revelation of invasion in the preparation of the assault a month later.

So Silman must guarantee that I focus on the absolute minimum I need, and fiddling around with simple positions will hopefully get me some new concepts or even a logical framework. Let me give it a first try.

Diagram 1. White to move

Usually, my mind is pretty blank with this type of positions. No triggers are firing, so to speak. I have some vague notion that I must drive the king to the rim and then separate the knight from the king and conquer it.

Silman gives a bit more information: I must mate the king while avoiding to be forked.

So there seems to be two possible goals:

• conquer the knight
• mate the king

Furthermore, the technique seems to be to chase the king to the rim. That doesn't need to be perfect, as long as it all happens within 50 moves. Let me see whether I can add a bit of precision. The tablebase says that it takes 22 moves to mate. Let me first investigate the ideal placement of the king according to  the tablebase.

Diagram 2. White to move

This gives a clue about what is going on. When the white king is in contact with the knight, white can conquer the knight with a simple tactic. For instance:

Diagram 3. White to move

The following tactics work:

• 1. Qe5+ chasing the king away from the defense of the knight
• 1. Qa8 pinning the knight
• 1. Qh1 skewering the knight
• 1. Qa4+ chasing the king away

But even a suboptimal move like 1. Qb1+ Kd4 2. Qd1+ works.

1.Qe1+ doesn't work because it allows 1. ... Ne3.

If I try to do the same for the queen in diagram 1, then there is no such thing as an ideal placement of the queen. So apparently the slowest piece (the white king) is decisive for the tactical approach. He must be close to the knight, while the knight must stay close to the black king.

This fiddling around with the positions from Silman must supply new insights. Silman is only responsible to make sure that I don't waste my time on useless positions (as Dvoretsky does). But the descriptions of Silman like "activate your king" are useless without fiddling around to make it concrete. Anyway, this is what I'm going to try. No hurry, no position is below my dignity. I already get new ideas.

UPDATE

Wat happens after 1.Kg7

Diagram 4. Black to move

The blue squares are forbidden for the black king while the blue circles are forbidden for the knight, because white can decide matters with a duplo attack. Being it a double attack, a pin or a skewer.

So what previous was an empty board with a blank mind, has now become a board filled with patterns. I think this is the way to absorb endgames. You can't force the black pieces to go to a square that is taboo. But when white brings his king closer, he takes away squares from black, so to chances improve. Driving the black king to the rim, even takes more squares away. So finally I have an idea what to do.