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Now on to this week's column...
This week I'm going to my “back catalogue” for a couple of endings by Michael Jones an Englishman whose games I used here back in February 2017. Michael sent three games then, and I discarded an interesting minor piece endgame which appears below.
At that time, seven piece tablebases weren't as widely available as now and I'm able to confirm definitely some analysis of one of his other games, which I strongly suspected but wasn't absolutely certain of at the time.
Michael, who is now 33, loves travelling and bridges possible language gaps by playing chess. He wrote two years ago about how, “I've played everywhere from the balcony of a youth hostel in Frankfurt and a thermal bath in Budapest, to a park in Kutaisi during Georgia's Independence Day celebrations and a bazaar in Kyrgyzstan.” He recently moved to Walsall but hasn't yet had time to join the chess club. He sent copious notes, which I've added to as JS.
In addition, there are two English games from the European Team Championships which by a huge coincidence ended up in almost exactly the same rook ending.
I was streaming during the first of them David Shengalia v Gawain Jones and was asked to check my endgame books. Somewhat to my surprise I found the exact (generic) position in "Basic Endgames" by Yuri Blashov and Eduard Prandstetter where they noted that with the king defending on the right square (g7/g2) it's a draw. Two days later, David Howell had the same ending but his opponent put his king on the right square and held.
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