Endgame riddle: The eternal duel - bishop vs knight

by Karsten Müller
4/15/2021 – The International Master Ole Jakobsen (19 October 1942 - 30 June 2010) from Denmark is not particularly well-known but from 1960 to 1980 he was one of the best players of his country and in 1969, 1971 and 1980 he won the Danish Championship. In 1973 he finished fourth in the IBM-B Tournament in Amsterdam, where he defeated Eugenio Torre, who was soon to become one of the world's best players, in an interesting endgame bishop versus knight. Karsten Müller has taken a closer look at this endgame and invites you to help analysing it.
Rules of thumb are the key to everything when you are having to set the correct course in a complex endgame. In this final DVD of his series on the endgame, our endgame specialist introduces you to the most important of these rules of thumb.

The eternal duel: bishop vs knight

Endgames in which the bishop fights against the knight – and vice versa – are often full of surprising subtleties. Often they are also complicated and not easy to understand. The following endgame, in which Black performs long manoeuvres with king and knight to win in the end, is a typical example. Was this win indeed forced or could White have saved himself, perhaps with the help of the 50-move rule?

The reader is invited to search for the truth about this endgame – could White have saved himself, and if so, when and how?

 

Share your analyses and findings in the comments!

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Karsten Müller is considered to be one of the greatest endgame experts in the world. His books on the endgame - among them "Fundamentals of Chess Endings", co-authored with Frank Lamprecht, that helped to improve Magnus Carlsen's endgame knowledge - and his endgame columns for the ChessCafe website and the ChessBase Magazine helped to establish and to confirm this reputation. Karsten's Fritztrainer DVDs on the endgame are bestsellers. The mathematician with a PhD lives in Hamburg, and for more than 25 years he has been scoring points for the Hamburger Schachklub (HSK) in the Bundesliga.

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