Welcome to this active site. Each week I am going to present to you an endgame position for you to solve or to workout the best continuation. Computer analysis will also be considered. Some of these positions will come from actual historical games. Others will be composed endgame studies, but all the solutions will be relevant to the practical game. The new position will occur each SUNDAY and I will always be pleased to receive POSITIVE feedback about the positions and the analysis and I will try to acknowledge these where relevant.

 

English Endgame Composer, Player and Chess Author. Remembered mainly as the compiler of the first major collection of endgame studies: A Thousand End-Games, published by BCM (1910-11). This was ground-breaking work by Tattersall in which he collected together the studies of Horwitz and Kling, Rinck and Troitzky and other earlier composers and classified them according to the material present. This was a brilliant work of love by Tattersall which has received very little acknowledgement.

The inspiration for this didactic study probably came from the game ending Salwe vs Rubinstein, Prague, 1908 which took place a few months before the above study was published. In this ending the rook pawns were blocked on the fourth and fifth ranks. For nearly fifty years theoreticians puzzled over this ending. The full story can be found in books by such endgame authorities as Benko, Dvoretsky and Averbakh.

In the above study Tattersall indicates the winning technique for pawns blocked on the 5/6 ranks which seems to predate by forty years another study by Jens Enevoldsen. I indicate a position from the Enevoldsen study to show the similarity:

Both of these studies can be found in Van der Heidjen's endgame study database. So for the first time Tattersall shows the winning technique for the stronger side with the a-pawns blocked on the 5/6 ranks. The process of winning for pawns in this situation is relatively easy to understand. The Black King is driven far away, to the f-file before the Rook is given up for the Bishop and pawn on "a6". The reason for this is to avoid the well known draw with K v KRP. Also in some variations he can win by exchanging the Rook for Bishop on "b5".  

1...Ke5 2.Rd1 Bb5 3.Re1+ Kf6 4.Kb6 Kf7 5.Kb7! Bc4 and now the Rook can get to the 6th rank by attacking the Bishop as shown in the main line. If Black had played 5...Kf6 then 6.Rb1! threatens to win with 7.Rxb5. If the bishop moves then again the Rook reaches the 6th rank and White wins with 8.Rxa6.