Opposition in the Endgame
Typically I’ve done annotated games when I’ve posted, but it takes a while to do that and my time has been limited lately with work and family. So I’ve been focusing on trying to take a snapshot from a game and use it to demonstrate something. Hopefully this is entertaining and instructive. We’ll see. For my first one I decided to focus on an endgame position that arose in one of my recent games on ICC. Here is the position…
So what we have here is an illustrative case of the idea of opposition in the endgame. I had spent the last several moves trying to get my king into a position to escort the e pawn to queening. No dice, Black is able to keep my king at bay with his king and 1.e7+ Ke8 seems like it will end in a stalemate, except…
White sacrifices the e pawn to obtain the opposition and force Black away.
2.Kc6 Kxe7 (2…Kf7 fails to 3.Kd7 when White’s e-pawn queens) 3.Kc7
And now Black has to back away from White. 3…Ke8 4.Kd6 Kf7 5.Kd7 Kf8 6.Ke6 Kg7 7.Ke7 and Black is lost.
If you’re interested, here’s the whole game…
Thanks Daniel. Always nice to see an endgame solution to a possible draw.