After a long battle, we reached this position in my game last night:
Black to move
Playing Black, I wasn’t sure whether this was a theoretical draw or a win for White, but I thought I had a reasonable chance to draw. (I looked it up this morning using this endgame tablebase web site, and it is a theoretical draw.)
I hadn’t studied this type of endgame before, but fortunately I had a few minutes on the clock to think about what to do. Obviously, I can’t let White force a queen exchange. If White is checking me, then he can force a queen exchange most typically via a fork, a skewer, or a pin. I decided that when White was checking, I would strive to keep my king off the same file, rank, diagonal, and color as my queen. In the position above, for example, I played 53…Kh2.
When Black is checking White, the primary danger is allowing White to get out of check in a way that forks Black’s king and queen. For example, after 57…Qd8+ 58.Qf6:
Black to move
58…Qd2+ would be a disaster because of 59.Qf4+ Qxf4 60.Kxf4 1-0.
With these ideas in mind, I managed to play 10 moves without error and without allowing the pawn to advance. It was getting close to midnight, though, and I wasn’t at all sure that I could play the 40 more error-free moves necessary to get to a draw.
You just never know what’s going to happen in a chess game, though. My opponent, who must have been getting pretty tired as well, walked his king into getting checkmated at move 62.
2 Comments
For a couple of patzers I thought it was a very interesting game. It had some opening drama, complex positional themes in the middle game and a 10 move calculation that resulted in the first diagram position. I thought it might be drawish but decided to test the waters. After 3 hours of careful play it only took 1 bad move to lose. I wondered during the game whether the KQ v. KQp endgame would’ve been ‘winnable’ if the pawn was on g-file instead of h.
That’s a good question, Fred. I would have guessed that if you moved the position over one file, it would be a win for White. The endgame tablebase I consulted, however, says it’s still a theoretical draw.