I would like to investigate a topic, that I find extremely important, yet it feels like it’s ignored and misunderstood by most club chess players. What is the fortress, how to build one, and how can this knowledge help from the practical point of view?
First, let’s define, that a fortress is a position with the defending side down in material, yet impossible for the stronger side to make any decisive progress.
The Grunfeld Defense is one of the main weapons these days against 1.d4 and is employed by the best of the best in the chess scene, to Grandmasters, Masters, and amateurs. It is nearly impossible that one doesn’t fall captivated by the dynamism and richness of one of the greatest choices against the Queen’s Pawn Opening.
Acquiring a good understanding of the positional elements is one of the keys that help you increase your strength as a player. These are concepts that one should always take into account, whatever the phase of the game. They help you decide how to place your pieces, which ones to keep and which to exchange, how to place your pawns and so on. Endgames are no different. In more complex ones, the same principles apply. It is important to know which ones favor you and how to put a better opposition in the ones you have to defend.
Any chess player who wants to make progress and increase his level should focus on improving his overall chess understanding; this can be done by studying classical games, strategy, and endgames. In this article, we are going to focus on the last phase of the game and where you can start from in order to make it easier to learn and understand it.
As well as openings and middlegames, having a good understanding of the endgame is essential in order to become a strong chess player. Endgames can prove particularly tricky if you have little experience or haven’t given them too much attention. For example, experienced chess players usually tend to show their superiority in this phase of the game, even though the rest of it might have been quite level.
Capablanca has always been one of my idols and the first conscious raise of my level happened after an every-day, 3-month study of his games. It was the winter of 2004-2005 and for three months, December, January, and February all I did was study and analyze Capablanca’s games every single day all day long. After this period I immediately won a strong open tournament and scored a GM norm.
We have many times emphasized the importance of creating a varied training schedule. While nowadays most of the players invest a lot of time into studying and learning openings, you should not forget about middlegame and endgame.
The opening is certainly an important part of the game, but in order to really understand chess and improve your strength you must see a lot of classical games and solve many exercises, for developing both tactical and strategic vision.
I’d like to devote this article to the Rook versus Bishop endgames. It is a very important endgame and is often misunderstood and misplayed at the club level. This endgame is not as complicated as you may think but requires some knowledge and precision.
Rook versus bishop endgame may not be the most often seen ending, but it appears pretty frequently and there is a good chance you will see it in one of your most important games. Regardless of the side you play, there are two types of positions you must know. The first one is the “typical fortress”, how to set it up and how to defend it.
The second one is the exact opposite: how to attack the fortress, and how to “break-through”, winning the bishop or checkmating the king.
Continuing our series of articles on important endgames that every player should know, we are going to present you today another situation that might give headaches during a practical game if you haven’t studied it beforehand – rook versus knight. From a theoretical point of view, this endgame is a draw.
There are, of course, exceptions and you must know what to be looking for and what to try to avoid in order to achieve the desired result. If in the case of rook versus bishop things looked rather easy, in this case, the weak side must be more careful, as many times the drawing moves are unique.
Studying endgames is always an extremely difficult task. In my personal career, I have always lacked the motivation and guidance to do so. Most of what I know today I have learned through self-experience after many tournament games and analysis with colleagues. This is far from the ideal way of learning endgames.
Lately, I have been trying to correct this problem and have started studying the endgame phase in more depth. It is first of all very important to know those positions that are theoretical draws but you still need to play accurately in order to achieve it. This is the case of the endgame presented in this article: rook and pawn versus bishop.
It is an endgame that I have played myself in a tournament game and was lucky to make a draw, but only because my opponent misplayed it.
