A Fine Rook Endgame, Part 4

by | Dec 22, 2022 | endings, games, literature, positions

Today I’m going to finish my series of posts on one of the classic rook-and-pawn endgames: the endgame with balanced pawns on the kingside, and with one player enjoying an outside passed pawn on the queenside. The prototypical position is number 367 in Reuben...

A Fine Rook Endgame, Part 3

by | Dec 3, 2022 | endings, literature, positions

I hope you’re ready for some very, very challenging endgame analysis! Today we’ll have what I think is the most difficult and interesting of my four posts on what I call the “Fine endgame”: rook plus 4 pawns versus rook plus 3 pawns, with the...

A Fine Rook Endgame, Part 2

by | Nov 12, 2022 | endings, literature

Last time I introduced a new series of four posts about a very basic (but very difficult) rook and pawn endgame. It’s the endgame where one side (we’ll say White) is a pawn up, and that pawn is an outside passed pawn (we’ll say an a-pawn). As per the...

A Fine Rook Endgame, Part 1

by | Nov 6, 2022 | endings, literature, tournaments

I’m back! Actually, I never left, but this blog has been silent for seven weeks, so some of you may have been wondering where I went. My apologies: I was busy with other things (like a book proposal), but to be honest, I just didn’t have any topics that...

One Day in Reykjavik

by | Sep 2, 2022 | Chess Life, literature, people, ruminations

My diary, 9/1/1972 Sadly, I was rooting for the wrong guy. This month’s Chess Life has an interesting 50-year retrospective on the Fischer-Spassky match. I thought that the most insightful article was a short interview with IM Anthony Saidy, who hosted Fischer...