The Queen is a very powerful piece, but even this powerful white piece is not able to checkmate the black king by itself. The white king is needed to support the queen. This kind of endgame is very common when a player has managed to promote a pawn. Attention has to be paid to avoid a stalemate and the mate must be reached within 50 moves as it is a draw if 50 consecutive moves occur without a capture or pawn move.
		Theoretically the maximum number of moves that is needed to checkmate is 10 which corresponds to the position of the upper board on the left side. First the black king is imprisoned as shown in the second diagram by 1.Qe5 Then the king has to come to assist the queen: 1…Kd3 2.Kg7 Kc4 3.Kf6 Kd3 4.Kf5 Kc4 5.Ke4 Kb3
		And the prison is made smaller: 6.Qc5 Ka4 If Black plays 6…Kb2 the reply is 7.Kd3. A smaller prison by 7.Qb6 and again the white king has to approach: …Ka3 8.Kd3 Ka2 9.Kc3 Ka3
		After 9…Ka1 white mates with 10.Qb2# but now it is: 10.Qb3#  It is a good exercise trying to visualize all the checkmating patterns with the queen and king.

Are you already able to checkmate with the rook?

It happens now and then that the only pieces on the board that are left are a pawn and two kings. If you are the player with the king and pawn, you have to move the pawn to the other side of the board and promote it to a queen (or a rook). But in order to do so, you must take care that the pawn isn’t captured by the opponent’s king.

Sometimes the solution is to move the pawn as fast as possible to the opposite site, but you have to be sure that the pawn will not be intercepted. Working all the moves out in your head may be very difficult and time consuming.
There is a very simple rule to determine if the pawn is able to make it to the other side. It is called the Pawn’s square rule.

This lesson is about this Pawn’s square rule.

Starting from the pawn, draw an imaginary diagonal line to the other side of the board. This forms the diagonal line of the square we are looking for.
If the king can get inside the square, the pawn will be captured. If the king can not get inside this square the pawn will promote.

In the diagram above the game will be won by White if it’s White’s turn to move. If it’s Black’s turn than Black will place his King inside the square and the result of the game will be a draw.

Starting from the diagram above with White to move:
1.b6 Ke5 2.b7 Kd6 3.b8=Q 1-0
You may want to look how to win this particular KQK endgame.

Starting from the diagram above with black to move:
1…Ke5 2.b6 Kd6 3.b7 Kc7 4.b8=Q+ Kxb8 1/2-1/2

One addition has be made to this rule. If the pawn is still at its starting position it can move two squares on the first move.
In such a case the square has to be visualised as if the pawn is one place ahead. Let’s have a look at the next diagram. It’s a draw if and only if Black plays 1…Kf3. All other moves lose. White is going to play 2.b4 and Black has to assure that his king can be placed inside the square 2…Ke4.



There are some other exceptions to the Pawn’s square rule (when other pieces block the path of either the pawn or the King), but we will deal with these later.

I’ll hope you enjoy these days and I wish you a Happy New Year

As mentioned in the previous post we are going to need a large database of chess games.
Where can be found such a database? I’ll mention some possibilities in this post.

Downloading by means of ChessDB
Within the Tools menu of ChessDB a “Download Games from …” option is offered to download a database of 100,000 games in the Elo range 2290 to 2851 or a huge database of over 3.5 million games. In addition ChessDB offers a possibility to update this database by downloading games from TWIC and importing them into the database.

TWIC
Each week The Week in Chess (TWIC) publishes a new zip file with PGN files of recent games. As mentioned above ChessDB has some functionality to download the recent chess games from The Week In Chess website, but you can also download the games by yourself (for example when using another database program).
MillBase contains the complete set of games.

ICOfY
Another free large database can be found at ICOfY. This large database contains more than 5 million games.

Chessopolis
If you are more interested in a specific opening the downloadable game collections at Chessopolis may be a nice place to start looking. Here you can find the Game collections by opening.

In order to improve your chess game it will be better to analyze your own games and learning how you can create your own chess lessons. This may be the most important chess lessons: learning how to create your own chess material.

For the creation of this chess material we will need some tools and one of the tools will be a chess database. However ChessBase is probably something that isnt affordable for most of the readers of this blog. Therefor I will use the free ChessDB during the next lessons.

But do we need a database to study chess?
No, you probably need more than one database: The first database contains all the games you have played, the second database contains games of possible opponents, the third database is just a large database which can be used to check how other players are trying to solve specific positions, openings, endgames, … and the last (fourth) database can be used to store the generated lessons.

And we probably may add some databases dealing with specific openings or other interesting stuff. But even without all these databases ChessDB can be used to enter and save your own games, analyzing them by means of Crafty and/or Toga II or making use of the included endgame tablebases.
The ChessDB tutorial may be a good starting point for further reading.

Next chess lesson will be about some free alternatives for a large chess database.

Originally this post has been published on chessteacherlessons.com, and it has been adapted to fit on this site. The other chess lessons will also be adapted and moved.

Some time ago I have visited a website with the title A Lazy Player’s Guide to the Scotch Gambit, but it seems that this site has disappeared.
This is a pity because the site gave a nice summary of the main lines of this opening. It is a good opening choice for players who like sharp openings and it’s easy to learn the basic ideas. It didn’t cover everything, but it described the most played lines and contained just the material most club players need. Now I’ll try to produce a similar post about the 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 exd4 4.Bc4 Bc5 variation of this Scotch Gambit and are going to learn you in one of the next lessons how you can make such an opening analysis on your own.
If someone knows where the Lazy Player’s site can be found, please add the URL to the comments.

Update: Michael Goeller has provided a link to the original Lazy Player’s site by means of the Wayback machine. This wayback machine enables us to find web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. This is the original archived Lazy Player’s Guide.

If you want to read more about this variation A glass of Scotch may be a good place to start.

Playing chess at vlora beach. Photo by Gábor.