Name: EASY CHESS ENDGAMES: Rook & Pawn
Uploaded: 2025-03-01T14:01:18.000Z
Duration: 23 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The game of chess is separated into three parts, the opening, the middle game, and the end game.

Future simple

End games can be a little bit more boring and mysterious to study, but you absolutely should, because they're theoretical, which means they're solved, which means that if you're winning a position, you'll know how to win it, and if you're losing, you might know how to draw it using certain tricks.

To-infinitive

In this video, I'm going to show you all the basics of rook and pawn end games.

We're going to look at a few theoretical examples, ones that have solutions and concepts already built in, and then at the end, we will look at a practical example.

Timestamps on the video player, as always.

So, the very basic rook and pawn end game position is one that looks like this.

It's just the absolute basic, and I'm going to introduce a few terms that you're going to be hearing throughout this video.

So you've got this pawn, and it wants to become a queen, and you have a rook in the way, and the king is going to walk with this pawn together to get the pawn to promote.

Ideally, the rook will have to sacrifice itself for it, and you'll be left with king and rook versus king, and you win the game.

The enemy king is not where it needs to be, which is as close to the pawn as possible, literally in front of it, in an ideal situation, and your rook is cutting off this king.

This king is very far away, three files away, actually, from any sort of defense.

This is completely winning for white, and you would win it by going like this, king to e5, trying to push the pawn.

Doesn't really matter where you move the king.

You can move in front, and then slide over.

You can also go here, threatening to push.

If I give you another check, notice that you've now zigzagged, and my rook cannot check you anymore.

If my rook goes to somehow try to hit you from behind, this is called a backward defense, backward check.

You don't want to necessarily move in front of your pawn.

I'll go here, push, and now there is a technique for me to get out, avoid getting hit by so many of your checks, and winning the game.

That is essentially the point, and again, your king is very, very, very far away.

So this is the absolute basic understanding of what this video is all about and why it's important, because some of these things are a little bit harder than others.

And the very first position we are going to look at has the king very close to our pawn and our king and everything like that, right?

So here, you are pushing the pawn forward.

Your king is moving forward, but it's black's move.

This one is known as the Philidor defense, and what Philidor defense means is black needs to defend the sixth rank.

If you are defending on the opposite side, like you are playing with the white pieces, it would be the third rank, but in general, two ranks away from promotion.

Because now the king cannot get closer, and essentially what black wants, black doesn't care about checks because the king can shuffle back and forth as long as the rook is moving like that.

If the pawn goes forward to create a shield for the king, because then you will check and potentially mate the enemy king, oh, this happened?

Because now the white king cannot hide from the checks.

If the white king comes closer, you have a backward check.

And the second the king starts to drift and run over that way, I mean, you can continue to check me if you want, at a certain moment you can go back and just target the pawn because it's impossible to defend it if the king wanders too far in the distance.

I mean, this is the easiest way to draw, sixth rank or third rank defense.

But one more thing about this kind of position is that you notice black's king and rook are on the back rank.

And actually, depending on where the pawn is, you can just put your king and rook on the back rank, and it doesn't really actually matter about Philidor.

Back rank defense, just putting your king and rook on the back rank like this, king in front of the pawn, is a draw if the pawn is a, b, or g, h.

Okay, so if it's a, b, or g, h, you can just go back to the back rank and you don't have to worry.

So why is this not a draw if you just do back rank defense?

Let's say black goes, okay, no Philidor, just gonna hang out on the back rank, it doesn't matter.

Okay, king g6, okay, it doesn't matter, I'm gonna go here.

Okay, f6, doesn't matter, back rank defense.

I mean, there is a little technique here for white.

Check, okay, let's say king, king, I mean it doesn't really matter, let's say king to h8.

Check again, king goes here, and now we use this pawn to check.

And we win like this, and we win, game's over.

Of course, we win the rook, we make a queen, you know how to do ladder checkmate, not teaching you that in this video.

However, notice if we go back just a couple moves, like let's say this position.

This technique just simply doesn't exist in this position.

Because if you give a check, you don't have an extra file.

And if you go g7 now going for this, you actually lose the game.

Because black checks you, you lose your rook, you lose your pawn, you lose.

So, you know, it really matters. a, b, g, h are the correct pawns to use back rank defense.

However, if you don't want to, 6th rank defense is known as Philidor, the pawn cannot cross.

And if the pawn does cross, you jump all the way down to the corner, and you give checks from the back.

But in this example, the king was in front of the pawn.

Here is an example where our king or the defensive king is cut off.

In this case, it's only cut off by one rank.

So, okay, it's not like the end of the world.

But the white king has managed to zigzag, zigzag, and get in front.

And the pawn is one score away from promotion.

Now, at this moment, the king cannot move anywhere.

But this is called now the Lucena position.

I should have put it in, like, down there instead of white and black.

In the Lucena position, white has a technique to get the king out and then promote a pawn.

And what white does here is white gives a check first.

This king has to make a difficult decision.

If the king stays as close to the pawn as possible, we just slide our king over and there's no check.

It doesn't matter if we lose our pawn because we're going to win the rook.

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EASY CHESS ENDGAMES: Rook & Pawn

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