Building Blocks for Opposition

I'm not as comfortable with opposition as I should be. I can understand the concepts but I want to be able to apply them without thinking during games. It's good to immediately know if a pawn-up endgame is winning or not. With this knowledge, you can use visualization to know that, for example, trading off rooks results in a king and pawn position which leads to a win. In another post, I borrowed Jeremy Silman's term of a crutch to rely on to tell you if a simple position is winning.

My idea is to memorize a few key king and pawn positions and then rely on visualization to "build out" from there. The purpose of this post is to show the fundamental positions and to explain why they're winning or drawing. In all these exercises white has the extra pawn so that is the side playing for victory while black is trying to defend for a draw with their lone king.

The Building Blocks
(NOTE: For now, just know that rook-pawns are special cases that are often drawn so we'll focus on middle pawns)

Verdict: Winning for white
No matter whose turn, white should win. 

Verdict: Drawn
This position can only be reached from white playing Kd6 so it must be black's turn and it is a stalemate position. Of course, if it was somehow white's turn, Ke6 or Kc6 forces the black king to give up d8.

Verdict: White to move will win. Black to move will draw.
If white to move, it's winning but he must first move his pawn to d7. That forces black to play Kc7 and white can then bring his king to e7 and guard the promotion square. If black to move then Ke8 draws because black gains the opposition. The losing move is Kc8, allowing Ke7 for white (and not d7+??)

Translating the Building Blocks
Wouldn't it be nice if you could move these positions further down the board and the verdict remained the same with correct play? Well, it doesn't really work like that because in those cases, black's king will have more space to move backwards and the idea of opposition becomes more important--namely the criterion of whose turn it is. 

Verdict: Black to move will lose for black. White to move will draw.
This is NOT fully winning for white as it was in the original Position 1. The opposition comes into play now that black is not backed up to the wall on the 8th rank now as in the original position 1. This position now depends on whose turn it is. 

Verdict: Drawn
If black to move, technically white has opposition here but white cannot maintain it because if black moves directly backwards--as they always should in these positions--white has to move his king to c2 or e2 and give up the opposition.

Verdict: Drawn
If black to move, he can gain opposition by Ke4 and draw the game. If white to move, a pawn push means black can just retreat on the d-file and anytime white's king tries to advance black can gain the opposition.







A conclusion you could draw is that, as long as there's space for black's king to retreat, he is generally going to draw if he can get his king in front of the pawn and get and maintain opposition. 



Cheat Sheet
Here are those positions all in one simple image. This needs to be memorized:


For rook-pawn endgames (meaning a-pawns or h-pawns), just know that if the enemy king gets in front of the pawn's path, it's a draw.



An idea for practicing endings:
Lichess mobile app (I have yet to find this feature on the desktop site) > Board Editor > Gear button.

There will be a dropdown menu for a ton of endgame positions you can choose. They have 14 different single-pawn endings you can practice against a computer or view in the analysis board! What I do is display each one and decide if it's winning or drawn if it's white to move, then if it's drawn or lost if it's black to move. Then I might play through it against the computer for the winning side, and if it can be drawn, I play as the side going for the draw. I might also pull it up in analysis board after I determine if it's winning or drawn and then see if I can test myself on other moves and if they're still winning or if there are losing moves in the position, and any other tricks one side might have.

More Practice
I made a huge list of king and pawn endgame positions that have the position of a white pawn, white king and black king, whose on move, whether it's winning for white or a draw, and what the best move is if there is a non-obvious critical move to win/draw. It's great because it forces you to visualize the position, much like you  might have to do in a game if you have the choice to head into a pawn-up endgame. Take a look at the spreadsheet. To study, I cover up the Verdict and Best Move columns, visualize the given position, then decide if it's winning and/or what the critical move is. There are a ton, so look at this like a test. Obviously the same building block positions are repeated over and over again but I translated them up and down the board and even included some rook-pawn positions! (See bottom of this post for the same list in a different order to help randomize studying)


NOTE: The best move for row 62 should say "Kd6/Kf6"

Two Examples
To tie this all together, here are two example exercises that should highlight the importance of knowing the basic building blocks:

1) If white to move, what should they play and what is the result with correct play? 

2) If black to move, what should they play and what is the result with correct play?






Solution: If it's white's turn, it's a forced draw with correct play so it doesn't matter what they play. If it's black, they can draw but they must play Ke6 to get the distant opposition and not allow white to advance safely. 


The next is from a daily puzzle on chess.com. The first question you should ask yourself is it okay for white to trade rooks here?

You should be able to visualize that doing so will result in black's king on c5 with white to move. If white plays Kd3, black can play Kd5 with the opposition and white has no good move that will give a favorable position that we've seen in this post. But white has other king moves.... 
Solution: 
1. Rxc5+ Kxc5  
2. Kf3! Kd5  
3. Kf4 Ke6  
4. Ke4 with a favorable king position!


To wrap this all up, here's a great video by John Bartholomew that covers the topic of king and pawn versus king: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLyRWZPXUzI&list=PLl9uuRYQ-6MDzm-bs8kbyHdYEmRGUauot&index=8

Pawn and King Endgame Spreadsheet Pt. Deux
NOTE: The best move for row 62 should say "Kd6/Kf6"

Housekeeping

I'm not sure what the topic of this post will be but I'll call "housekeeping" to borrow a Sam Harris usage.

So I've been trying to play a classical 15+15 game a day and sometimes throw in a blitz or rapid here and there. I believe I am 5 games away from getting to my magical 200. I've won a few, drew one or two that I shouldn't have, and lost some to higher-rated players. Anyway I'm still focusing on analyzing and learning stuff from every game.

Beyond playing games, here's how I've been studying the "four areas" that I laid out in an earlier post.

OPENINGS

I was trying to memorize some classical lines and othe rpopular openings from that spreadsheet I made. I was doing pretty well in the open and semi-open games (not sicilian yet though) when I sorta decided to halt that some. But I was able to do a lot of it at work, for which I'm pretty grateful.

TACTICS

I'm still trying to do some of the chess.com tactics every day. My puzzle rating on that is in the mid-2000s and I'm pretty proud of that. I attribute that to my idea to spend at least 10 minutes on the puzzle if I need to. They are noticeably tougher but fun to think through, and very satisfying if I get the right answer. Beyond that, I have Polgar's 5334 Chess Problems always pulled up on my work computer and in downtime I might do a page or two of those. I'm currently on the mate-in-two section. I still have it in the back of my mind to try a spaced repetition routine on this book at some point. It's a treasure trove of pattern recognition.

I'm also going through some of Dan Heisman's videos on youtube--I strongly recommend those if you haven't checked them out--and he mentioned one of his favorite chess books is called "Winning Chess Exercises for Kids." I managed to find a copy and, well, aside from the childish delivery of the material, it is actually a pretty great book. It's more or less 100 pages of worksheets. Each worksheet has nine problems and one short question for fun. It's three rows of three positions each, the first row being three mate-in-X problems, the middle row are material tactics, and the final row is three "find the best move" positions which might be strategical or defensive and it looks like the final one in the row is always and endgame position. As usual, I have a spreadsheet going at work where I record my answers for a page then grade myself and mark in red those that I got wrong so I can review at the end. I'm finding it pretty simple yet I still miss one here and there.

MIDDLEGAME/STRATEGY

I finished the reading and note-taking for Silman's Amateur's Mind but I haven't got through all the positions in the end of the book. I still want to go through all those at least once, but he goes through the entire game so I keep thinking it'd be more beneficial to play the whole game through since he gives more notes on it. Hard to do that at work.

I'm also trying to analyze my games with the middlegame strategies in mind but I think I need to focus on pawn structures more as I've allowed worse structures for myself in many games.

Another idea is to play through annotated master games, as Dan Heisman said that's one of the main reasons he thinks he reached NM so fast.

ENDGAMES

I read through Part 4 of Silmans Endgame Course but I must go back through and take more notes. There was a LOT of good information in there and it is the longest chapter in the book. I also need to practice more pawn endgames. I fucked up one in my most recent 15+15 game and it went from winning to drawn to losing and back to drawn. I was up a pawn, and....yeah I was thinking draw the whole time. Lame. So frustrating.

I need to begin practicing basic endgames against the computer.


Things TODO

Continue going through the tests in the back of Amateur's mind (ideally I go through them a second time more thoroughly). 

Do the 4-moves-at-a-time visualization with some famous games (see "visualization practice" post).

Go through Part 4 of Silman's Endgame Course and take notes.

Start to practice endgame positions that are provided in lichess' mobile app and in Bernd Rosen's endgame book I have.

Do a few pages from "Winning Chess Exercises for Kids" a day.

Work on 5334 problems.

Continue watching Dan Heisman's videos

I recently bought his book "Most Instructive Amateur Games" (Something to that effect) and I will start working through those games on my physical board at home.

Try Heisman's "20-minute drill" where you pull up a random position from a master game, assess it, find candidate moves and decide on one. Key is to take exactly twenty minutes on the position before finding your move. I can also do this with the 25 positions in the end of amateur's mind actually.

Take a deeper look at this online book: https://archive.org/details/Simple_Chess_New_Algebraic_Edition

Finding Crutches in the Darkness

Crutches in the darkness?!

Wow, that sounds like my next goth-metal project. Or a novel. Or...something.

I'm doing some endgame study and I'm finding that a good foundation on which to build endgame knowledge is to look for "crutches" to help you navigate the darkness. Haha that sounds dramatic. Well it's also dramatically soul-crushing to let an endgame slip away that you later discover was winning. In his Complete Endgame Course, Silman was discussing the trebuchet idea when he first mentioned that knowledge of it can serve as a guide to help you in a rather confusing pawn vs pawn endgame. He says that if you can safely get to a position leading to the trebuchet and you understand the inherent zugzwang in the trebuchet position then you might be able to tell if a frozen pawn vs pawn endgame might be winning. Therefore, where you'd normally be stumbling through the darkness, all of a sudden you fumble around and see this crutch and you can stand! And get to a winning endgame! 

Silman says 

"The idea of something definable which can help us understand the right path in seemingly tough positions is an important one."

A crutch is a piece of knowledge or understanding that you can rely on to help you achieve a goal. 

It is the definable thing in a position you can point to and say, "that's winning" and I think it's extremely valuable in navigating basic endgames for beginner players.

The most basic example is "knowing how to mate a lone king with a queen." Granted this is a simple one and it is chapter one stuff of any beginner endgame book but it's a crutch nonetheless, one of which some don't know. But if you know it, and you find a position that can lead to a queen-up endgame, you'll jump to it immediately. Obviously!

Other crutches might be basic opposition, trebuchet, the square of the pawn, the deep freeze, the Lucena position. They're little patterns, positions, or techniques that one must know. They give you building blocks and positions to strive for, so that if you find one of those crutches, you can use it to win or more often to find another crutch that leads to another that leads to a win.

If white moves, you see he cannot save his f4 pawn, so black will take it regardless and have his king in front of his pawn with white's king not in any position to defend. After a few more king moves, you should see that black's king will be able to control the queening square. It's a simple, definable idea.

You can look up more information on the trebuchet but the point of this post is more broad than that. If you can memorize that position and the reasons why it's a dead loss for whomever has the move, then you've acquired a new "crutch" you can use!

Look at this example from Silman's Complete Endgame Course:

So, what's going on? For a beginner, it looks pretty messy, maybe even a draw. And therefore one might begin just making random moves like taking the pawn and then trying to get back to the center. But with a few moves of calculation and newly acquired knowledge of the trebuchet, you might see that black should be able to make contact with the frozen pawns first, thus threatening to take. So white must react and when he does, he'll force the trebuchet onto himself.

1. Kxh6 Kxc3
2. Kg5 Kd3!

See why 2. ...Kd4 doesn't work??? After 3. Kf5 black is on the ugly side of the trebuchet. 2. ...Kd3! is the move.

3. Kf5 Kd4!

And here we've reached the trebuchet "crutch" which you know is winning for black because it's white to move and he is in zugzwang. If this wasn't in black's toolbox, he'd probably lose because he'd play the natural-looking 2. ...Kd4? and let white get the winning trebuchet position. But instead, black wins the pawn but also the game because black immediately gets the more dominant king in front of its pawn, which is another crutch. In other words, from the darkness of the endgame jungle of Diagram 97, we found these two crutches we're familiar with (trebuchet and dominant king) that helped us stand up and walk to a winning game--due to yet another crutch of how to mate with queen vs lone king! You might realize you start avoiding mindless moves like 2. ...Kd4? and you're more aware there are winning moves and losing moves in otherwise seemingly simple positions.

Lastly, here's one more very simple one. Silman refers to it as the deep freeze:

If white to move, he could play a5 which freezes black's pawns for the time being. So here we have one pawn stopping two! Obviously, depending on king positions, there may be a better move but this example serves to show how simple some of these ideas can be. In fact, many crutches can be simplified to two- or three-pawn positions on very small areas of the board. Here's the deep freeze in its most basic form:

And that might be all you need to win! Maybe in one of your endgames you have an outside passed pawn that black has to deal with, and on the other wing you can push one pawn to freeze two, then use the "fox in the chicken coup" crutch to win the game! See how we're chaining these ideas together? Deep Freeze-->Fox in Chicken Coup-->Control Queening Square-->Queen vs Lone King Checkmate Pattern. It makes calculating endgames much simpler.

Conclusion

So, for me, this is one major point of studying endgames for my level. I want to build endgame knowledge from these building blocks. They still require accurate calculation and visualization to see if you can get to a position to utilize some of these crutches, but the more of them you have in your toolbox, the better! So make it a point to acknowledge as many of these building blocks as possible.

Visualization Practice

Good visualization exercise using a real board! I saw this video posted on reddit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0fQF8Ula5Q&feature=youtu.be

It gave me an idea to do this with some popular classic and romantic-era games:

1. Read out or be fed four moves at a time (i.e. 8 half-moves).

2. Visualize what the board will look like after that until you're absolutely sure you have it in your head.

3. Quickly move the pieces where they need to go. Maybe to avoid rote memorization of move order, play off the visualized position in your head. And you could move white pieces first, then black.

4. Continue with four move sets.

5. At some point you'll reach your mark you put in the list where you'll do another 4 moves and then you should prompt yourself to find the mate, just like they did in the video.

6. As you progress to new games, try 5 moves at a time, then 6 moves, etc. At some point perhaps your goal could be to pick out classical miniature games that had mate on the board (or that you know ended with resignation because mate-in-X moves), and visualize the ENTIRE game up to the point when mate was inevitable and ask yourself to write out the moves leading to mate.


Obviously, in step 5 I referenced a "mark" where you prompt yourself to "find mate-in-X" or "find the tactic to win material" so this requires some planning ahead so you'd have to find some classic games where mate or a good tactic was forced and/or played out.

Here's a start for some famous games to consider doing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_games#cite_note-49

An Idea for Openings

I'm still following the advice of "Don't memorize openings until XYZ rating" but I do want to start learning how to identify most popular openings. It started with a reddit post listing a ton of openings with both names and moves. I took that and ran with it. It had its share of errors so I made my own (part of my DIY-approach to improvement). From that reddit post, I took any of the opening names that I had at least heard of and put them in a spreadsheet. I added in a bunch of other variations that I thought were worth knowing or looked popular. Then using wikipedia and lichess (sidenote, you can also open the mobile app>Menu>Board Editor>Gear Symbol> and choose an opening to see the first moves), I populated all the moves for the openings I chose. I ended up with 89 openings.

I wanted to memorize them so I could say, "here's a Caro-Kann Advanced Variation" or "This game started with a Sicilian Rosslimo." It could be a launchpad into exploring the openings further down the line, or it could just help in communicating about chess in general and following commentators more easily.

Anyway, here's an image of my spreadsheet.

The actual spreadsheet has more columns for things like general ideas, external resources like youtube links on a given opening, tricks and traps, and common continuations. I'm slowly adding to that but my first objective is to memorize the names and moves of these 89 openings.

How to memorize?

I spend a lot of downtime at work (there's a lot for me) on chess stuff. I figure this is a good time to study openings, at least the basic opening moves, since it's pretty much an excel sheet with text so I don't have to have a chess site open or stare at lichess on my phone which might look suspicious to fellow co-workers. One caveat is that I had some portion of this list already known from my time playing some of the openings and also from putting the list together in general. Like they say in college, sometimes just writing the notes is enough to help you begin learning.

Here's my old school way of memorizing at work:

1. Pick a subset of the openings (like the e4 section for example). Re-acquaint yourself with each one, basically just read through each line. Like cramming before the test.

2. Then start at the top, hide the name column and for each line, read through the moves and write/type in a .txt file the name of the opening. Example: e4, e5, Nf3, Nc6, d4....is the Scotch Game.

3. Check over what you did in step 2 for errors. Take note of the ones you're struggling with.

4. Now go back through but hide the moves this time. For each opening name, mentally recite the moves.

5. Go through the subset a third time, hiding the moves again. For each opening name, write/type out the moves. 

6. Check your work noting the ones you're still struggling with.

7. Move on to other subsets until you've gone through the entire table. Then start fresh again but make your subsets larger. And pay special attention to the ones you've had a hard time memorizing. Feel free to take out the ones you absolutely know by heart. Consider using a real chess board at home to shake things up.

Eventually you'll have them all memorized. It will probably help to shuffle up the order of the subsets as you're going through this, and eventually shuffle the order of the full list of your openings.


Ideas for more study

* Pull an opening out of a hat, play through the moves on lichess' analysis board, and guess the most popular continuations from the opening database. 

* Add a column in your spreadsheet for "General Concepts" and use various resources to find out the common themes in each opening such as where the pawn break is, what files usually open, if it often leads to a minority attack, etc.

* Find a famous example of a game for each/most openings and play through it, annotate it, memorize it, etc.