The Chess Mind

Solving king and pawn endings is among the best exercises available to a chess player.

For starters, the reduced material makes calculating everything in one's mind relatively easy, even when the variations are extremely long. Second, pawn endings are fundamental, so skill in solving studies is very likely to translate into improving one's playing skill in a pretty direct fashion. And finally, they're just plain interesting! (At least I think so, and I hope some of the exercises I present will leave you feeling the same way if you don't already.)

Here's the first one:



From an actual game, Black to move (and draw). (Solution tomorrow; quasi-hat tip: Chess Today-1936)

Courtesy of reader Joseph Amaral, our second king and pawn ending study is a reasonably well-known effort by F. Teed (1885):



White to move and win.

For this problem, I'd like to make a special request of my readers: please write me, via this link, to let me know two things: (1) your attempted solution and (2) your rating. (But please do not give the solution in the comments!)

The solution will be given on Tuesday.

Finally, here's a third exercise for your solving pleasure:



This exact position is my invention (at least to the best of my knowledge), but I've seen the key idea at least twice before: once in a rapid Jay Bonin game, and once in Alexander Baburin's excellent Winning Pawn Structures. (Cf. his analysis of Kholmov-Kremenietsky, USSR Trade Unions Ch. 1981, pp. 105-108. A note about the book title: it's inapt (though it wasn't Baburin's fault), as 90% covers the isolated queen pawn and the remaining 10% the affiliated hanging pawns and isolated pawn couple structures. It's not a general treatise like Andy Soltis' Pawn Structure Chess or Hans Kmoch's old Pawn Power in Chess.)

This background out of the way, the task is to evaluate 1...g5. The solution will be given on Wednesday.

Here's our starting position, originally presented in this post:



It's Black to move and draw, from the game Golod-Seeman, Cappelle la Grande 2006. Think you've got it? Click here and find out!

We started here, with this deceptively simple position; the task White to move and win:



I also requested that readers who attempted to solve it let me know their (attempted) solutions and their ratings. Between readers, friends and students, it seems that for players 2000 and up, it's pretty straightforward; around 1700-1800 most of the key ideas are spotted fairly quickly but some detail or other is usually missed; below that, only dogged effort will succeed (and occasionally did, as in the case of regular reader sbb1cpa).

So thanks to everyone for their feedback; I might try something like this in the future, too, to build up a collection of positions that can be more precisely ratings-indexed than "easy", "kinda tough", "migraine-inducing", etc.

And now, the solution - click here.

The third in our recent series of king and pawn endings featured this position:



With Black to move, the task is to evaluate 1...g5. It looks sensible, but is it? If you think you've got it worked out, click here. If you want a hint, click below.