Saturday 6 November 2010

Endgame Agony


One of the criticisms of faster tournament time limits is that it doesn't allow players to play complex endings. While this is certainly true, I always felt it did reward players who knew their endgame technique. For example, a lot of Australian weekend events are played with a G60m+10s time limit, and a player who knew how to play "technical" endings could really clean up.
Today I saw a number of endings that fell into the category of "technical endings". They were all rook and pawn endings, they were all against the same player, they were all better for the players concerned, and the net score was 0.5/3. Granted the defending player made the task as difficult as possible, but he should have dropped at least 2.5 points.
The most amusing example is shown in the diagram. It is White's move and moving the rook along the rank (except to a7 or h7) is enough to win. However the game went 1.Kh5? Rh1+ 2.Kg6?? (not seeing the danger) 2. ... Rxh6+ Draw agreed. Interestingly White had demonstrated good technique to get to this position, but fell at the final hurdle.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I dont think White can win after Kh5. So Kg6 is not the move requires ??. Am i wrong. Sample line; instead of Kg6, Kg4 then Rxh6; again it`s a draw.