Greetings Readers!
Last week, we had a long-overdue shipment of our own books delivered to the QC office, to top up our reference library and for staff to take home personal copies – a nice perk of doing this job.
I took home several books that day, but there was one title that I absolutely could not wait to start reading and working through: Theoretical Rook Endgames by Sam Shankland.
From helping to finalize this book prior to its publication, I could tell what a special piece of work it was. And while I’m not exactly a slouch in rook endgames, I recognize that I can benefit tremendously from tightening up my knowledge of them.
On Thursday and Friday nights, I went through the first two chapters. I mostly skipped over the Lucena and Philidor positions which I know inside out, but I looked more carefully at the next set of positions, where the defending side was unable to set up the Philidor (third rank) defence, but was still able to draw. Take the following position:
Even with White to move, Black should draw comfortably. With Black to move, the drawing margin is even greater – although I noticed from the book that Sam once won this with White against a young Daniel Naroditsky. (In that game Daniel was to move and his rook was on f4 rather than f1, which should not make any significant difference – see page 32 of the book.) The general drawing technique was not new to me, but I still found it beneficial to play through it on a board with Sam’s helpful explanations. Same thing with other, related examples, for instance with the extra pawn on a central file. The material is superbly organized, with each example building on the knowledge of the previous one.
Anyway, I played in a local rapid tournament on Saturday, and was interested to see the above position occurring on one of the higher boards, in the 5th (penultimate) round. Black messed up the defence but then White failed to win when he had the chance. This alone seemed like a big coincidence after I’d studied it the night before, and proof enough that studying these endgames is of great practical benefit. So you can imagine my surprise when I reached the following position with White in the decisive final round:
Yes, the identical position, only mirrored on the queenside, which obviously makes no practical difference. Fortunately for me, my IM opponent made some mistakes and I was able to get the win, which meant I enjoyed outright first prize rather than sharing with about four other players.
When you study endgames such as the above from a book, you are mainly learning how to secure the draw for the weaker side, but I also experienced a great benefit on the pawn-up side. Knowing the correct defensive technique, I quickly recognized each of my opponent’s defensive mistakes and exploited them. (I would share the moves, but I’d stopped notating well before this point and wouldn’t trust myself to reconstruct it all.)
Anyway, “Study rook endgames!” is hardly a revolutionary piece of advice, but I wanted to share this little story to remind you that these endgames really do arise frequently over the board, and knowing the correct technique really does affect the outcome of games – and sometimes your bank balance too!
I cannot recommend Theoretical Rook Endgames highly enough. This book will be my main (perhaps only) topic of study prior to next month’s Olympiad – I can’t give any greater endorsement than that.
PS – It would be remiss not to point out that the sister volume Conceptual Rook Endgames is also superb, but I’ve chosen to highlight TRE because it’s the one I’m currently studying myself, and it’s entirely logical to study theoretical endgames as a foundation. I’m sure a CRE blog post will occur at some point in the future!