Winning a drawn game

In the following game, I could have played a promising exchange sac on move 11, and could have won a clear pawn on move 12. Instead, I played several inferior moves, giving White close to a winning position by move 18. White in turn played some inferior moves, allowing me to escape into what should have been a dead-drawn ending with rook and three pawns against rook and three pawns on the same same of the board. Oh well, beats a loss, right? But much to my surprise, White played extremely passively and I was able to eke out a win. I'm now 87-0-0 on GameKnot, though as I keep saying, my perfect score will come to an end soon. (This was one of the games that was supposed to end it.)

My opponent was no GM, to be sure, but even the best players can screw up simple rook endings. GM Alex Onischuk (in)famously lost a "dead drawn" 3 pawns versus 2 pawns ending at last year's Olympiad, and even then-World Champion Kasparov once lost a 4 pawns versus 3 pawns ending, another easy theoretical draw. On Facebook, NM Gopal Menon recently annotated his game against GM Alex Shabalov. After a long fight, Shabalov accepted Gopal's draw offer. When Gopal later analyzed the game, he was shocked to realize that Shabalov was completely winning in the final position! Chess is a hard game.

First game won for the franchise

Chopper Trading lost its first match to Rogue Squadron in the Chicago Industrial Chess League 4½-1½, but Reza Gholidzadeh had the honor of the team's first individual win...against yours truly.

A bizarre ending

One of those games that demonstrates why Grandmasters are Grandmasters. I think there was a double blunder on move 44, but please don't trust this analysis. (If you're looking at this with a computer, please keep the horizon effect in mind: the engine's initial evaluation of the pawn ending may be wildly inaccurate.)

Don't ask me what's going on....

As someone who gave up on the King's Indian more than twenty years ago, I always root for the queenside attack. So FM Eric Rosen (who usually doesn't throw pieces to the wind) makes me happy in the following game.  A piece gets sacked on 28, then an Exchange a few moves later...so I guess that's a deferred rook sacrifice.

Black sacs back to reach a not-quite-tenable rook ending, and Eric gets to display his typical outstanding technique.

The talented loser of this game, IM Daniel Naroditsky, is the author of the second third book I've ever read that was written by a teenager (I'm not sure that I finished Une Saison en Enfer, post pedantically amended to include Radiguet's Le Diable au Corps: oh you Frenchies). Naroditsky's Mastering Positional Chess is strongly recommended.

All rook endings are drawn...

...except for the ones that aren't. The comments to Jim Duffy's game made me take another look:

Fabijonas-Duffy, CICL Individual Championship
After 33...Ke6
White to play and draw
(more than one solution, but there's a simple route)

After 46.g4
Find Black's best move

After 48...Rxa1
Find White's best move

Avoid rook endings at all costs...

...if you're playing Jim Duffy.  When Jim won the second section of last month's CICL Individual Championship (Larry Cohen won the first section, with the same 3-0 score as Jim), I asked him to send me his effortless first-round game.  He pointed out that he had won an even more seemingly colorless game in the second round.

Some players have a modest rating, but are exceptionally strong in one phase of the game.  If you are strong in the endgame, you will save many lost games and win most of your "hopelessly drawn" games. Cultivate your strengths!

Active rook + active king = won game.  Jim provides some light notes.

Vishy!

I watched the World Championship playoffs from 3 a.m. to 8 a.m Chicago time.: exciting stuff!

Viswanathan Anand first won the unified World Championship in 2007: this is his third successful defense (Kramnik 2008, Topalov 2010, and now Gelfand 2012).  Understandably, Boris Gelfand's Chicago fans must be very disappointed, his childhood teachers Tamara Golovey and Leonid Bondar chief among them.  But Tamara can be very proud of her student's playing Anand on an absolutely level footing.

The third game of the playoffs was incredibly bizarre, even if one overlooks the tactic Gelfand missed on move 26.  Here's the rook ending:

The PGN has been cut and pasted from the official website, with Black's 51st move corrected
per Dennis Monokroussos (and confirmed by me from rewatching the video).  (Hmm: the official website appears to be wrong in another respect.  Ian Rogers includes a repetition of position on moves 55-57: see below.)  Black's 51st move was indeed the blunder 51...Kf5? and not the correct 51...Kf4!: had 51...Kf4 52.Rc8 been played, I can't imagine Anand missing the elementary intermezzo 52...Rc2+ 53.Kg1 Ke5.

It's amazing (and amazingly painful) to see a supergrandmaster blunder in this position:

What in the world was Gelfand thinking when he played 61.59.Rh7??  (My best guess is that Gelfand was trying to prevent Anand from playing ...Kb7 and setting up the Vancura position with a subsequent ...Rg5+, ..Rg6, and ...Rc6.  But there's no time for this: White's king simply runs immediately to the h-pawn and relives the Rh8 of guard duty.  You can check this yourself with the Shredder endgame database.  And as long as White has the rook on h8 and is threatening to push the pawn to h7, Black's king can't come any closer than the c-file because of the beginner's skewer trick (explained by Matt Pullin here).

Of course, when one is playing on a ten-second increment, as Gelfand was, there isn't any time for "thinking."  What a painful way to toss away the win!  (Time pressure blunders in world championship matches are nothing new, of course; and the mutual blunders in this rapid game are not at all representative of the overall high level of play in this match.)

If world champions and their challengers can get confused in positions with only five or six pieces on the board, we should be more forgiving of our own errors.  (This past weekend, I managed to lose a queen for rook and pawn on the White side of a Catalan in only eleven moves: hmm.)

Chess is hard.

***

P.S. May 31

Gelfand had more time than I thought, and the hallucination was mutual.  GM Ian Rogers quotes Anand in discussing the above position:

Despite having built up almost a minute on the clock through four quick moves, Gelfand returns the favour. The obvious 61.Kg3-g4 wins, whereas the text move (i.e., 61.Rh8-h7)  is too slow by one tempo. “I thought I would get a Vancura position,” said Anand, “but I don't.”

And the official website appears to have an incorrect game score in another respect, omitting a repetition of position: the actual final moves were 55.Kg2 Re3 56.Kh2 Ra3 57.Kg2 Re3 58.h5! Re5 59.h6 Rh5 60.Rh8 Kxc6 61.Rh7 Kd6 62.Kg3 Ke6 63.Kg4 Rh1

A Rook Ending from the Denker

Here's a position from Moskwa v. Kogen that illustrates the differences between rook endings and queen endings discussed in the last post.

Robert's pawn is nearer to queening but that's not nearly as big an advantage in a rook ending because the Black rook will sacrifice itself for the new queen after which the White rook won't be able to handle the Black king and connected pawns alone and may be forced to sacrifice itself in return.  A queen could handle the Black king and pawns with ease.

The game went 39.Rc8 Rd3 40.Ke6 b3 41.d7 a4 42.d8=Q+ Rxd8 43.Rxd8 Kc5 and in order to draw White will have to hustle his king over to help with the defense and sacrifice his rook at the right moment.  On the other hand, 39.e5! would have won after 39....Rd3 40.e6 Rd5+ 41.Ke4 Rxd6 42.e7 42.Rxe7 42.Rxe7  because the White king is close enough to assist the rook before the Black pawns advance too far.

Cross posted at Prospect Chess

That darn Kantorovich/Steckner position

Mark Dvoretsky made the winning technique famous in Dvortesky's Endgame Manual.  But is this practical rook ending a draw after all?

White to play: 

Is 1.Kd4 sufficient to win? 

 Karsten Müller explains in his Chess Cafe column.

Jasaitas - Braswell, CICL, 3/1/2012

Tony was kind enough to share his notes to this game. These annotations, lighthearted yet informative, were written after Isaac's death, but days before any of us in the chess community learned the sad news. Both players had fun!

The game itself demonstrate that good things can happen to those who persevere in the face of adversity.

(Incidentally, the ratings are CICL ratings, not USCF.  While Tony's rating is probably representative of his current strength (his USCF rating, somewhat stale, is above 2000), Isaac's last USCF rating will be 2075, and he peaked above 2100.)

CICL action

The big fish get away precisely because they are big fish. David Franklin of the Rogue Squadron annotates his loss last week to Igor Tsyganov of DRW Trading Group. (Last November, Igor drew GM Alexander Shabalov at King's Island.)

Solution to Kleiman study

Become the alpha nerd in your club with Dr. Harold van der Heijden's endgame study database HHdbIV!

M. Kleiman 

Chess Life and Review, 1968

White to play and win

Checking distance in K,R & P vs. K & R

After some embarrassing play at the Illinois Class, I have decided to take another run at getting basic endgame theory straight in my head.  Since I figure an expert should know Philidor and Lucena, I'm starting with King, Rook and Pawn vs. King and Rook.  My resources in this endeavor are Fundamental Chess Endings by Muller & Lamprecht, Batsford Chess Endings by Speelman, Tisdal & Wade, Comprehensive Chess Endings by Averbakh, Silman's Complete Endgame Course by some guy whose name I don't remember, and the 5-piece tablebase in ChessBase 8.

Here is a position from Batsford Chess Endings (p. 334) which I have looked at in the past.  1...Re1 is the only move that saves the draw for Black, and the reason given by BCE is "This move stops the e-pawn's advance after Ra8+ Kf7."

Here's the kind of position I might find myself playing as White in a tournament with my time running low.  I vaguely recall the position from BCE so I am somewhat encouraged when my opponent plays 1...Rg1+.  I'm not sure it's a blunder, but I'm pretty sure that 1...Rf1 would have drawn.

After 2.Kf6 Kg8 3.Ra8+ Kh7 4.Kf7, I am once again encouraged when my opponent plays 4...Rc1 because I know that checking distance is important and that his rook would be better off on the b-file.  So I play 5.f6 Rc7+ 6.Ke6 Rc6+ 7.Ke7 Rc7+ 8.Kd6.

Then my opponent suddenly scoots off with 8...Rb7! and I am left wondering whether I missed something or whether I never really had anything in the first place.  If I am lucky, I still hold the draw.  If not, my time runs out while I'm trying to figure out what happened.

So let's go back to the first position where 1...Re1 is necessary according to BCE because it "stops the e-pawn's advance."  This reason now strikes me as just plain wrong.  The tablebase tells me that the Black can draw even if the pawn advances to e7.  The reason 1...Re1 draws isn't because it stops the pawn from advancing.  The reason is that it forces White to bring his rook to e8 which allows the Black rook to take the a-file!  2.Ke6 Kf8 3.Ra8+ Kg7 4.Re8 Ra1!  1...Rd1+? loses to 2.Ke6 Kf8 3.Ra8+ Kg7 4.Ke7 Rb1 5.e6 Rb7+ 6.Kd6 Rb6+ 7. Kd7 Rb7+ 8.Kc6 when the Black rook can't scoot away.  BCE's comment that "the rook is misplaced on d1" isn't particularly instructive either.

The example in the second diagram actually comes from Fundamental Chess Endings rather than one of my games.  It gives 1...Rf1 as best but says. "1...Rg1+ is less accurate as White can penetrate further . . . although this still isn't sufficient to win."  I think that sentence would be much better if it ended with "because the Black rook still has adequate checking distance on the side."  It's not that BCE, FCE, and CCE don't mention checking distance frequently, it's that they don't cite it as the reason for a move when it plainly seems to be.

I would be very happy if anyone else would like share their experiences trying to learn these types of endings.  I feel like being able to articulate a better explanation for a move than I find in any of my books is itself a real step forward.  Of course, the test will come the next time I have to play one of these positions in a game.

A Basic Drawing Technique in King, Rook and Rook's Pawn v. King and Rook

Consider the following two positions which were inspired by Robert Moskwa's game at the Illinois Class with World Under 8 Champion Awonder Liang. White has just checked the Black king with his rook and Black has the choice of moving away from the White king and pawn with 1...Kd7 or towards them with 1...Kb6. The only difference is that the White rook is on c4 in the first and c3 in the second.  Both positions are theoretical draws if Black makes the correct choice. See if you can figure out what the right move is in each case before you look at the analysis on my blog.

Eric Rosen at World Youth Championship, Caldas Novas, Brazil

Round 5 pairings here!  Eric is doing very well so far, with two draws against higher-rated players and two wins.

I found the draws at The Week in Chess.  Eric defends a difficult Taimanov Sicilian with skill:

An exciting opening (the Ragozin QGD) fizzles out to a sterile draw:

Andi Rosen will be covering the event for Chess Life Online.

Samvel Ter-Sahakyan

GM Samvel Ter-Sahakyan of Armenia leads the event: he finished second in last year's event, held in Greece.

A great deal of endgame wisdom condensed into one position

Jeff Coakley's Winning Chess Exercises For Kids  delivers a healthy dose of endgame wisdom along with the tactical exercises.

White to play and win 

In the general case, are rook endings easy to win?

Board 2: Young ½ - Rodriquez ½

Finally getting around to the games from Monday's loss to Miami. The adjective "benkogambity" is overused, but perhaps it fits here. Each player is ambitious in his own way; a correct draw seems the logical result. Take note of Angelo's good drawing technique in a slightly uncomfortable rook ending: he gets rid of the h-pawn (a potential target) before he widens the scope of the enemy rook by moving his f-pawn.

Chicago Industrial Chess League season underway

As always, check out the latest results at the fabulous CICL site.  I play for the AMA Rogue Squadron in the East Division: we won a tough match on Monday against Blue Cross / Blue Shield 4-2.  Our teammate Jim Duffy lost a very interesting game to Sonny Mata, and it took me a long time to figure out the computer evaluations in this very interesting ending.  Please take the following notes with a large grain of salt: I'm still not sure I understand what was going on, and computers are not to be trusted in rook endings!

 After 40.Kc2

Black to play: how to stop the e-pawn?

Analysis diagram

White to play and win: harder than it looks!

Zugzwangs I missed this summer (part II)

My opponent in this game, NM Kevin Cao, is one of the strongest young players in the Midwest.

Kamsky wins 1st game of World Cup Round 3

Gata Kamsky drew a very tough pairing for the Round of 32: many put the 20-year old Ian Nepomniachtchi in the same class as Carlsen and Karjakin.  Great win!

Judit Polgar won her first game against Karjakin.  Ivanchuk has to win with Black to avoid elimination.