Endgames often hide their beauty. Their treasure is sometimes only detected in the analysis as during the game there is no time or stress dominates. A deceptive easy looking position not seldom demands a lot of extra research compared with what we initially believed.
In positions with a very limited amount of material it is evident that the king plays a major role. The king doesn't wait anymore in a corner but is actively participating in the battle. In some endgames you get the feeling that the king does the job all alone. Recently I studied a few of those endgames and once again I was surprised how complex and beautiful chess can be.
After my very fortunate victory in round 3 of Open Leuven on Iuliia Morozova, I had to play the same evening still against the Belgian grandmaster Alexander Dgebuadze. I didn't play well the opening which forced me to spend a lot of time avoiding an immediate defeat. Later in the game I managed to fight back but in the end I run out of time. Short of time I blundered and got a lost endgame on the board after which the flag rescued me of further suffering. At least that was how we both evaluated the game till I discovered with an engine that the endgame wasn't lost at all.
The illusion is that black easily wins with his fast passed pawn and this fast bishop prevents any counter-promotion. However the truth is that the slow king is sufficiently fast to support the pawns and simultaneously slow down the passed pawn. A remarkable performance which reminds me of the famous Reti-study.
A second example of an illusion I met in the book From London to Elista which I read during my holidays in Russia. I discovered the existence of the book a few month ago by accident and I immediately decided to buy it. The book is easy readable with more shortened analysis than Kasparovs books of his matches with Karpov. The book wasn't written by Kramnik but is a project of the for me unknown Russian amateur Ilya Levitov which relied for the analytic part on the strong Russian grandmaster Evgeny Bareev. This brings a special dynamic in the book with sometimes good but also less good chapters. Especially when Ilya tries to make statements about some technical aspects then I am a bit annoyed by the ignorance. In the book after the missed winning chances by Kasparov of the 8th match-game a reference is made to the strange resignation in the game Kramnik Svidler, played in Wijk aan Zee 2004. Svidler resigned in apparently a drawn position which Ilyia unjustly classifies as a beginners-mistake.
The resignation has nothing to do with being ignorant about the basic rule of 3 columns between 2 passed pawns in an oppositie coloured endgame as Ilya claims. On the contrary, it is because Svidler knows this rule that he resigned as he had the optical illusion that such lost position was unavoidable.
A third and last example of an optical illusion which I want to show here, is an endgame which I met a few years ago in an analysis. Again I was surprised that my engine immediately showed a win while I thought on first glance that it should be an easy draw. Later I tried to compose an endgame-study out of it with an introduction but I must admit that I didn't get further than a rough diamond.
Except for the funny king-walks, I find it extraordinary how white still managed to get black into zugzwang. Anybody with time and energy is free to rework the study into something looking better.
Despite the small steps, the king is often not weaker than a piece but this only becomes clear in the endgame when the king can join the action. Besides the mobility of the king is more difficult to grasp as it can reach a square via several routes in the same number of moves but optically the distance looks each time different. Maybe this is simple for somebody like Ivanchuk. When Yasser Seirawan asked him why Jobava resigned after the first round of the still ongoing Wijk aan Zee , then he replied "It is not so difficult for a good grandmaster". However for us ordinary mortals such optical illusions are much tougher to see through.
Brabo
After my very fortunate victory in round 3 of Open Leuven on Iuliia Morozova, I had to play the same evening still against the Belgian grandmaster Alexander Dgebuadze. I didn't play well the opening which forced me to spend a lot of time avoiding an immediate defeat. Later in the game I managed to fight back but in the end I run out of time. Short of time I blundered and got a lost endgame on the board after which the flag rescued me of further suffering. At least that was how we both evaluated the game till I discovered with an engine that the endgame wasn't lost at all.
A second example of an illusion I met in the book From London to Elista which I read during my holidays in Russia. I discovered the existence of the book a few month ago by accident and I immediately decided to buy it. The book is easy readable with more shortened analysis than Kasparovs books of his matches with Karpov. The book wasn't written by Kramnik but is a project of the for me unknown Russian amateur Ilya Levitov which relied for the analytic part on the strong Russian grandmaster Evgeny Bareev. This brings a special dynamic in the book with sometimes good but also less good chapters. Especially when Ilya tries to make statements about some technical aspects then I am a bit annoyed by the ignorance. In the book after the missed winning chances by Kasparov of the 8th match-game a reference is made to the strange resignation in the game Kramnik Svidler, played in Wijk aan Zee 2004. Svidler resigned in apparently a drawn position which Ilyia unjustly classifies as a beginners-mistake.
A third and last example of an optical illusion which I want to show here, is an endgame which I met a few years ago in an analysis. Again I was surprised that my engine immediately showed a win while I thought on first glance that it should be an easy draw. Later I tried to compose an endgame-study out of it with an introduction but I must admit that I didn't get further than a rough diamond.
Despite the small steps, the king is often not weaker than a piece but this only becomes clear in the endgame when the king can join the action. Besides the mobility of the king is more difficult to grasp as it can reach a square via several routes in the same number of moves but optically the distance looks each time different. Maybe this is simple for somebody like Ivanchuk. When Yasser Seirawan asked him why Jobava resigned after the first round of the still ongoing Wijk aan Zee , then he replied "It is not so difficult for a good grandmaster". However for us ordinary mortals such optical illusions are much tougher to see through.
Brabo
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