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Subject: Re: Pawnless endgame (slightly OT, rather long)

Author: Shane Hudson

Date: 19:25:05 04/28/02

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On April 27, 2002 at 16:33:28, Dieter Buerssner wrote:

>Inspired, by Pavel's post
>(http://www.talkchess.com/forums/1/message.html?226413)
>and the following loss of my engine, I searched for pawnless endgames with more
>than 3 pieces.
>
>I do not have any big databases. I used 2600.pgn from Dann Corbit, and wrote
>some code to find those endgames (perhaps chess database programs can do this, I
>have no idea). Perhaps some of you find it also interesting.

No idea about commercial databases (I don't own any), but Scid makes it easy.
It even comes with a sample small program for computing how often (in how
many games) each possible 3/4/5/6/7-men material configuration occurs.

The results for a 500,000-game database (without the 7-men figures) can be
found at:
   http://scid.sourceforge.net/tbstats.html.
The most frequent 3-3 pawnless are KRB-KRN, followed by KRB-KRB and KRN-KRN.
For 3-2 pawnless, KRB-KR and KRN-KR occur far more often than anything else.

Cheers,
Shane

>Some notes:
>twice there was KRBKBN, both times the stronger side won.
>Karpov-Kasparov: BNN could not win vs. R. They played more than 50 moves without
>capture/pawn move.
>Bareev-Milos: The game ended in draw, in a position where white has a forced
>mate.
>If I am not mistaken, there was no position that has the 6-men Nalimov TB
>available (however KRBKBN positions can be looked up through the Web at a page
>by Ken Thompson)
>
>I handled pawnless positions, that have only one minor piece advantage or less
>(and not B-pair vs. N) as rather drawish. This is correct for all the positions
>with 3 pieces. But I think, I must to come to the conclusion, that with more
>pieces, a minor piece advantage, and perhaps even R vs. minor piece, is often
>enough to win. Also, thanks to Dan Anderson for his comment.
>
>Regards,
>Dieter

[PGN games snipped]




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