An oft-quoted maxim of Wilhelm Steinitz is that “the king must be treated as a strong piece both for attack and defence”. While sceptical about the truth of this statement while queens are on the board, I thought of it more than once while analysing a series of tactical queenless middlegame from a book “Damen …

The 4NCL continued in Northampton on 14th-15th January 2017. Fortified by 2 lovely meals courtesy of our generous captain Roger Emerson, I managed to produce a nice attacking finish on the Sunday morning. Presumably I’d need 4 great meals to play well both days! The attack had some unusual points and my investigations prompted the …

In this final article in this series on the rook and bishop versus rook ending, I would like to examine both some typical mistakes and some unexpected saving resources from over 600 master games.   Cochrane’s Defence. The hidden pitfall.   Cochrane’s Defence is the most reliable way to defend this ending when starting from …

In a previous article, I examined the winning technique from the Philidor position in detail. In the next couple of articles, I want to spend some time on the best way to defend the rook and bishop against rook ending.   To help me, I put together a database of decisive rook and bishop against …

Part of my routine daily work as a chess professional was to run through a set of about 100 endings and make sure they were committed to memory. These encompassed typical endings in various material configurations, and of course R&B vs R was one of them. I don’t have time to do that sort of …