Greeting players and fellow patzers 🙂
Have many of you guys on here had a K+Q vs K+R?
I had played roughly 900 games on this site before I recently encountered my first one,
and felt the topic is worth a little gloss over... feel free to ignore if you're all too familiar.
It was actually a game from the Mikelom memorial tournament.
Feicko had already won my group (congrats to him)
but this game vs. him turned out to be an interesting study,
at least for me, as I had never studied this endgame before.
It is in fact a forced win for the Queen, for the majority of cases,
except there can be some cases where a careless mistake forces a draw.
There is however this - the 'Philidor position' from 1777:
No matter who it is to move, this position is forced winning for the Queen in all possible variations.
See how many you can spot.
I found a site which provides a good, thorough basis of which to understand the techniques needed here:
http://www.chess-insights.com/queen-vs-rook.html
And just to wrap up, below is the game which sparked all this off, with some commentary.
I play Black.
Hi 64,
I recall mentioning this ending in October last year Blog Post 272.
"Queen and Rook Endings the RHP Way"
Certainly needs re-capping every now and then.
If GM's fail to find even the most basic win then what hope do we have.
B. Gelfand - P. Svidler FIDE World Cup 2001. (Black to play.)
Svidler missed the win (Qc5+) and the game was later drawn.
Same blog has plenty examples of RHP players screwing this up.
In some cases they misses a win allowing stalemate or lost because
they missed a stalemate.
In your game.
Opposite side castling is all about tempo. 'First to attack wins - First to defend losses.'
Here.
White played a safety first 15.Bb3.
He should have pushed the a-pawn right away. there is no 15...bxa4 16.Nxa4 Qxa4
because 17.Be6+ wins the Queen.
(3....h6 should have been met with 4.d4 exd4 and 5 c3 or 5.0-0 have played both in
that position and had some good wins.)
Yeah I remember that Svidler miss, shocking, but he does tend to hallucinate as he says in some interviews!
Thanks for your comments on the game, I know h3 shouldn't really be played too early but I guess it depends on my mood at the time 🙂
"first attack wins" - well I was probably going to ignore a4-a5 anyway and carry on as I did, and if a6 then simply move the Bishop back.
If axb5 then I'd have done the same, and it seems my Bishops are safe, and defend my King (?)
It was a good game, I'm only happy to have finally encountered this type of endgame...
I somehow think that if my first time was OTB I may not have been able to convert the win.