Author: Dieter Buerssner
Date: 09:36:10 04/27/02
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On April 27, 2002 at 12:00:24, Robin Smith wrote: >It looks to me like Yace is more correct. Even if white loses the a3 pawn it >would still probably be a draw. The general "rule" is that you need an extra >rook's worth of material to win pawnless endings. I hope, you are correct :-) However I am not sure anymore. You have more or less described, how Yace evaluates this position. But in my todo list, there is a point, that I should check this, and perhaps change it. I remember a game, that Yace lost with the weaker side of (IIRC) KRBKBN. One can lookup this TB from Ken Thompson (it was not available at Robert Hyatt's site, however the TBS file that has only the statistics was available). I looked up all game positions at Thompson's site, and indeed it was at every move a forced win for the stronger side. At one or 2 moves, it was a draw, because the distance to conversion together with the moves already done exceeded the 50 moves rule. When I looked at the statistics in the TBS file, there were many wins (and many very long wins - but one cannot see the distance to conversion). I would like to know, how all the good players here see the "drawishness" of such pawnless (at least for the stronger side) endgames, where the stronger side has only a minor piece more, or perhaps even only and exchange (? I mean R vs. minor piece) more, in the more complicated cases (more than 3 pieces on the board). Would this judgement of "drawishness" depend on the kind of minor pieces (N vs. B, or only one side has B-pair). I would not be interested in the easy wins, that can be seen by search. BTW: Another exception from the rule: "A minor piece more is not enough to win without pawns" is KBBKN. Regards, Dieter
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