Jon Speelman: Major and minor

by Jonathan Speelman
12/3/2023 – Endings with a rook and a minor piece each are especially difficult. There is still enough firepower on the board for plenty of tactics, up to and often including mating attacks. But in contrast to middlegames, where unless matters are very forcing you have to rely to a great extent on intuition, in principle you “ought” — with material limited — to be able to calculate fairly accurately! | Photo: John Saunders (2007)
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A rook and a minor piece

[Note that Jon Speelman also looks at the content of the article in video format, here embedded at the end of the article.]

A week and a bit ago, I played a London League game against the strong FIDE Master Andrew Lewis. We’d played a couple of times previously with honours even, and this time I got the advantage after the opening but rather messed it up before reaching an ending with rook and bishop vs rook and knight and an extra pawn. Eventually, we reached the diagram where I missed a very nice win and was lucky still to win anyway after we had a double hallucination which could have left me scrabbling to draw!

Endings with a rook and a minor piece each are especially difficult. There is still enough firepower on the board for plenty of tactics, up to and often including mating attacks. But in contrast to middlegames, where unless matters are very forcing you have to rely to a great extent on intuition, in principle you “ought” — with material limited — to be able to calculate fairly accurately.

I had a look through my database of my own games, which contains over 2650 of them (though sadly I lost some of my early scorebooks at some stage). And when I put a rook and one minor piece each into the search mask, more than 400 came up in which this material balance had arisen, at least transitorily.

I remembered a game against Mark Hebden years ago at a British Championship in Brighton — apparently it was in 1980 — in which with an attack against my king, Mark carried on trying to win with R+N v R+B and two pawns! Eventually, by dint of great effort, I managed to repel him and win, and in my fond memory I had played really well to do so. Of course, when I exposed my efforts to our lords and silicon masters, they were less impressed...

I’ve added a well-known drawing mechanism with R+N, one ending I’ve definitely used here before a while ago, and one which I thought I might have used but apparently not?

Here I played 34...Bf8?. Can you see why this was a mistake, allowing a nice resource (pretty difficult) and the superb tactical sequence which engines point out to give Black a clearly winning position?

Select an entry from the list to switch between games

In over 4 hours in front of the camera, Karsten Müller presents to you sensations from the world of endgames - partly reaching far beyond standard techniques and rules of thumb - and rounds off with some cases of with own examples.

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Jonathan Speelman, born in 1956, studied mathematics but became a professional chess player in 1977. He was a member of the English Olympic team from 1980–2006 and three times British Champion. He played twice in Candidates Tournaments, reaching the semi-final in 1989. He twice seconded a World Championship challenger: Nigel Short and then Viswanathan Anand against Garry Kasparov in London 1993 and New York 1995.