Tuesday, April 7, 2020

The wrong bishop and the wrong rook pawn.

An interesting thing about chess endgames. In the game I just played, I had nothing but my opponent had one bishop and one pawn which is usually enough to win the game, but I was able to get a draw because my opponent's pawn was on a rook file and he had the wrong bishop. He could not force my king to get out of the way.

Long before the game ended I knew I could force a draw.

Here is the game. It was a stalemate. I had the black pieces:

https://lichess.org/a0qYW6yX/black#165

This is from Wikipedia:

Wrong rook pawn

In chess endgames with a bishop, a pawn that is a rook pawn may be the wrong rook pawn. With a single bishop, the result of a position may depend on whether or not the bishop controls the square on the chessboard on which the pawn would promote. Since a side's rook pawns promote on opposite-colored squares, one of them may be the "wrong rook pawn". This situation is also known as having the wrong-colored bishop or wrong bishop, i.e. the bishop is on the wrong colored squares in relation to the rook pawn. In many cases, the wrong rook pawn will only draw, when any other pawn would win. A fairly common defensive tactic is to get into one of these drawn endgames, often through a sacrifice.

In some endgames such as having a bishop and pawn versus a lone king (perhaps with pawns), the wrong rook pawn is the one whose promotion square is the opposite color as that on which the bishop resides, which makes the stronger side unable to win. This was known at least as early as 1623 because of an endgame study by Gioachino Greco.

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