In part one we reported on a game that took place in the Estonian Team Championship in February. The game lased 228 moves (456 half-moves) and took 379 minutes, or 6 hours and 19 minutes to finish. I was convinced that I had a winning endgame — queen and knigh pawn against queen — and I was steadily shepherding my pawn from b6 to b2. But I was prevented from doing so by the seventy-five-move rule.
Let us look at the game in detail. I have briefly commented on it, trying to understand how, having obtained an advantage with Black as early as move three, I managed to drag the affair out all the way to move 229.
In the final part of this series I will show you how this endgame had to be played, how you can handle the endgame of queen and b-pawn (or g-pawn) vs queen.
Valery Golubenko is a FIDE Trainer, Estonian Rapid Chess Champion (1993–1994), and a multiple-time Estonian team champion in classical chess, rapid and blitz, as a member of the Diagonaal club, with titles spanning four decades — from 1986 to 2026. He holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics and is even the author of his own definition of the imaginary unit in higher mathematics.
But above all, Valery is the father of two daughters, Alexandra and Valentina, who lost their mother in 2012.
Together with Alexandra, he is affiliated with the Swedish Chess Federation, while Valentina represents the Croatian Chess Federation. Valentina is the first Woman Grandmaster from Estonia, and became first World Champion in classical chess from Estonia, winning the Girls Under-18 World Championship in 2008.
Three members of the Golubenko family: Alexandra, Valera and Valentina in Tallinn, 2023
Earlier, in 1999 in Spain, at just nine years old, Valentina competed in the World Championship for Boys Under 10, shared 6th place among a hundred players, defeating Maxime Vachier-Lagrave with the black pieces in the final round. Today she runs her own chess channel, streaming the performances of her team IntrovertChess in the Bundesliga. The team has over 2,300 members and has achieved a best result of second place in the main Bundesliga competition. Valentina is trained as a psychologist, her professional work lies outside chess.
Her younger sister Alexandra competed in the European Youth Championships in 2015 in Croatia (Girls Under 14) and in 2019 in Estonia (Girls Under 18), in rapid, blitz, and chess problem solving, coming close to winning the problem-solving championship. By education, Alexandra is a game designer and artist; in 2021 she held a solo exhibition in Tallinn’s Old Town.
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