| May-03-13 | | kevin86: the grooup of pawns make up for the rook sacrificed. One finally queens. |
|
| May-03-13 | | RookFile: The queen vs. rook and pawn ending was interesting. I don't think white played it the best way. Was there a possibility of a draw? |
|
| May-04-13 | | kevin86: Q vs R+P can normally be a draw,but in this position,Anderssen is subject to mate threats with his confined king and really has no escape. Black will catch the rook next. |
|
| May-04-13 | | Nerwal: At the beginning of this ♕ vs ♖+♙a3 endgame white is lost because his pieces are badly placed. However play was not perfect. 72... ♔d3?? 73. ♔a2! is a draw. 73. a4 is actually a terrible mistake. Around that time (1866) Guretzky-Cornitz established that there are many drawn positions with the pawn at a3, but none with the pawn at a4. |
|
| May-04-13 | | Amarande: Indeed, move 72 was very easy for Black to slip at, and actually, according to the tablebase, Kd3 was no special error - the position is an only-move one, Qd5+! being the sole move to hold the win. (Six obviously bad Queen moves throw the game immediately, and all others, including Kd3, produce a drawn game.) This, as well as the folly of a4?, is to be expected by the general rules surrounding Q v R+P endings, which were at that point being studied and by 1941 (Fine's Basic Chess Endings) would be pretty much crystallised. On the Rook's file, a pawn must be on the third, sixth, or seventh rank to draw. Note that this is contrary to the normal defence - on the four centre files (Fine indicated that the Bishop's pawn acted like a Knight's pawn, but Muller and Lamprecht's tablebase-derived research in Fundamental Chess Endings suggests that it actually is more like the centre pawns), a pawn on the third loses, while a pawn on the second draws. (The reason for this vital difference is because the RP on the 2nd allows mating possibilities against the cornered King that override the normal situation; meanwhile, a centre pawn on the 3rd allows the attacking King to eventually worm its way behind the pawn and win, a strategy that fails while the pawn is on the first.) With the pawn on the fourth rank, on the other hand, the defence always fails, unless it is a Knight's pawn (as with the centre pawn on the 2nd, Knight's pawns virtually always draw, and for the same reason - there is just enough clearance to enable the necessary defensive moves, and not enough for the attacking King). The same is the case on the fifth rank for a Rook's pawn, and usually for a centre pawn as well (Fine gives centre pawn on the 5th as variable, but Muller and Lamprecht in FCE basically imply this to be usually lost as well). With any pawn on the sixth or seventh rank, the game is usually drawn because the pawn poses too much of a threat (although sometimes a win is possible against a central pawn on the 6th, if it can be prevented from advancing). |
|
| May-04-13 | | Nerwal: <amarande>That's right, from an human point of view, 71... ♕d4+? is the real mistake, not 72... ♔d3. 71... ♕d4+ makes the win very difficult whereas after 71... ♔d4 it's quite simple. This error is quite curious, because 71... ♔d4 looks very natural. |
|
|
|
|
Kibitzing
sac: 30...Nxd5
icon.