Level up Your Endgames Part 1: The Importance of a Single File

An interesting shift I’ve observed during the pandemic and post-pandemic years is how quickly new players start learning about the endgame. When I first started studying chess with serious coaches, theoretical endgames were one of the earliest topics covered. I learned about the Lucena and Philidor positions, opposition in king and pawn endgames and much more, being promised that even if I didn't see the exact positions we discuss on the board, I’d learn universally applicable ideas about endgames and the strength and limitations of individual pieces.

Nowadays, the way people start out learning chess is much more online, and exploits different tools. Newer players excel quickly tactically by practicing puzzle rush, puzzle storm or a tactics trainer, they have better openings than ever before by learning a chessable course or playing around with an opening explorer, and then learn to make quick decisions and manage their clock by playing blitz and bullet games right from the get go. It’s hard for me to say whether this learning approach is better or worse holistically than the more classical one I followed. However, newer players I’ve worked with who started learning during the pandemic have pretty much universally had less complete knowledge of theoretical endgames than their similarly rated peers I had worked with previously. In this series, I’ll go through several theoretical endgame ideas that I think are indispensable, and provide an online resource for new players needing to level up that aspect of their game.

Today I’m going to be talking about a simple but often overlooked and misunderstood idea in simplified endgames. The closer to the side of the board is a pawn, the higher the drawing tendencies of the position. The reason for this is the risk of stalemate. Let’s imagine a situation where white’s got an advanced center pawn and black is defending with his king on the back rank. A stalemate defense will be difficult to achieve, because the king has 5 squares it can move to. Conversely, if the king is on a corner square defending against a similar passer on its file, then from the corner it only has 3 squares, greatly increasing the chance at a stalemate.

In King and Pawn endgames, flank pawns have an even higher drawish tendency than in other endgames, because simplified king and Pawn endgames are almost universally won through Zugzwang (the concept of putting your opponent in a position where any move they make ruins their position. Without zugzwang, the key winning ideas of triangulation and opposition have no merit and the stronger side is stalled out. The issue with putting someone in zugzwang with a flank pawn is once again the increased risk of stalemate. When trying to put someone in zugswang, you need to limit the number of squares they can move to. As it turns out, those squares you want to force them to are exactly the ones which don’t exist for a flank pawn “the mythical i-file,” and instead you’ll just end up putting your opponent in a stalemate. I’ll end with an example of this.

Hopefully you all learned something today about the drawish tendencies of flank pawns, and can apply those ideas to save and win some of your own endgames. Before I go, I’ll share a fun and perhaps counterintuitive exercise with you. I'll be posting the solution in the comments later this week, so get in and share your solutions before I do. Despite the extremely similar nature of all these positions, two of them should end in a draw with best play, and two of them should be a win for black. Your challenge is to tell me which.