The Everything Chess Basics Book (30 page)

Keep Your King in Front of the Pawn

This is the key to promoting a pawn in king-and-pawn endings. The pawn needs to move forward in order to promote, so those forward squares are the ones needing support.

If you can control the promotion square, your pawn will promote safely. If you cannot, your pawn will not get through.

It may seem anti-intuitive to move the king in front of the pawn that you want to push forward. But the squares the pawn has to cover on the way to promotion must belong to you, or the little guy will never make it. Control those squares and you control the game.

Here is an example of winning with the use of opposition when you have a king and pawn versus a lone king.

White to move wins with 1. Ke6 Kd8 2. Kf7 and the pawn marches through.

This is an example of stopping an enemy pawn from promoting with your lone king using opposition.

Black to move draws with 1. ... Kf8! 2. Ke6 Ke8 3. f7+ Kf8 4. Kf6 stalemate.

Chapter 9
Planning
Checkmate

Checkmates don’t just happen randomly. You have to set them up by visualizing them in advance. Then you have to find a way to get your opponent to cooperate. This isn’t easy, since nobody wants to get checkmated. In other words, you have to plan for checkmates.

The Basic Checkmates

The first thing you need to plan checkmate is to know just what a checkmate looks like. Therefore, here are a number of checkmates using the various pieces and pawns. All nonessential pieces and pawns are removed so you just see the pure checkmate. Even the White king is missing in most cases.

The queen covers the g-file as well as the seventh rank escape squares. Black’s rooks cover the other escape squares.

The queen covers everywhere the Black king could go, except her own square, g4. That is covered by the White king.

The h8-rook covers all h-file squares, while the g6-rook covers all g-file escape squares.

The rook covers all eighth-rank squares, while the seventh rank is denied to the king by his own pawns.

The White bishop covers h8 and g7, while Black’s own bishop and pawn take away the other escape squares.

The e5-bishop covers the dark squares, while the e4-bishop covers the light squares.

The White knight covers b8 and c7. All other escape squares are taken up by Black’s own pieces.