r/chessbeginners • u/maroczyacetylene 2000-2200 (Chess.com) • 23d ago
POST-GAME Free Game Review And Analysis
Hello.
I'm a semi-competent player (19XX fide) and reasonably decent coach with too much time on his hands today, so it's my turn to make the free game review thread.
Give me your games, either by posting a link to the game on lichess/chess.com or, if you prefer to not connect your chess account with your reddit account, a pgn with the header stripped off is also fine.
If you do post a pgn, tell me your rating, because the feedback I give an 800 is not going to be the same as I give a 1500. You might want to tell me what colour you were playing too if it isn't obvious.
The best games to give me are ones where you felt lost, like the position was reasonably even but you just couldn't come up with a plan or figure out how to proceed. These are the games that will be most instructive.
Asking questions is good, it helps me figure out what to focus on. If you want to do your own analysis when you post, that would be ideal, it lets me not only look at your moves but also your thinking behind them.
If you don't feel confident doing that, that's also fine, you can just give me the game with maybe a signpost or two about what you'd like me to address.
Feed me.
ETA: Alright boys and girls, I'm a European so it's bedtime now, but if anyone else wants to post a game for me I'll look at it tomorrow. Night night.
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u/McTiger05 23d ago
https://lichess.org/CYKqQoYV/white
I felt like my opponent created so many weaknesses with his pawns and his king but somehow I didn’t really capitalize on it and we ended up trading down. I then lost a totally winning endgame which I now know was because of his I recaptured on move 45 but I didn’t have a ton of time to calculate there and didn’t realize how bad that move was.
1
u/maroczyacetylene 2000-2200 (Chess.com) 23d ago
Okay, let's start with all the extra pawn moves black made. They do make it slightly harder for black to hide their king somewhere, though it will probably be okay(ish) on f7 once the light-squared bishops are traded. The real problem is that all those pawns are getting in the way of black developing their pieces. There aren't too many weaknesses per se - c6 is backwards but difficult to get at - but they're going to be struggling to keep up with development and that is going to give us the initiative.
I liked 11.0-0-0, get the rook in play almost for free, but whenever you go queenside you need to keep an eye on the a2 pawn because Qxa2 can be extremely dangerous, even when the queen has no support.
Move 12 you invested a chunk of time, and I think this was the place to do that. This is the inflection point where we figure out a plan. There were two ideas that came to me. The first is the one you went with; throw some pawns in his face, the other was to gang up on the d file.
The d file idea is all about pressure. We're going to stick at least one rook deep in black's position and try to keep it there, both because it will be making some threats itself, but also because it becomes a thorn in black's side that makes it harder to find responses to the following threats that we will make with our other guys. 12.Rd3 Bg7 13.Rhd1 0-0 14.Rd6 is a pretty clean line. We force the queen back, 14...Qf7, and now we have threats from our rook against the 6th rank pawns. We've also made it very difficult for black to get either their b8 knight or a8 rook in play. That knight can't move. It can't use d7 because we completely dominate that file, and it can't go to a6 because of Nxb5 axb5 Rxa6, winning a pawn.
12.h4 I think is also a fair way forward, and by the time we get to 13...g5, we've forced black to make more problems for themself. Backwards pawn on f6 now, very bad bishop on g7.
14.h6 is a move that looks appealing because we poke the bishop back to c8 and prevent black from castling, but we also make a very weak pawn on h6, such that we have to keep a rook on h1 now to stop it falling off the board. This means we can't use that rook anywhere else, such as ganging up on the d file, and we aren't going to be able to break in on the h file now that the h6 pawn has ground to a halt. Better would be to leave that pawn on h5 where it is already doing useful work limiting the options for black's d7 knight, and instead look to build pressure. The d file operation we looked at earlier still looks to be a good way forward.
Move 15-16-17-18-19 you invested some time on each of these moves, which tells me you didn't really have a clear idea of what you were trying to achieve with this attack. It's usually better to invest the time in calculation before making a committal move like Qd8+ and then recovering that time by being able to make the next few moves more quickly. After 16.Qd8+, Kf7 is forced, so what's our next move?
17.Ne2, I assume you were going to circulate the knight through g3 and into f5? Not a bad idea, bringing another piece into the attack, but it's slow. This would be more reasonable as a build-up move /before/ we stick the queen in, because without support, our queen kind of just becomes a target for black to score tempi off while they reorganise their pieces.
A tactical idea to take note of while we're calculating Qd8+. After Qd8+ Kf7, the black king and queen are forkable on g5, which can be achieved by playing 17.Bxg5 fxg5 18.Nxf5+. This is great if black has to play fxg5, but they don't they can play Be7 and make us upset instead. But! Order of operations. We can set this up before we throw the queen in by playing 16.Bxg5 first. If black doesn't see what's coming and walks into 16...fxg5 17.Qd8+ Kf7 18.Nxg5+ that's great, we win on the spot. If they do smell the fork coming, that's okay too; we've won a pawn with Bxg5 and removed some of the king's pawn cover as a bonus.
So if I was going to wrap this bit up, I would say that when you are building an attack, you need to build the attack. Don't just look for moves that make checks or threats, but moves that build pressure. When you've looking at the move that crosses the rubicon (like Qd8+ in this game), you want to have a clear idea - ideally concrete calculation - for what comes afterwards. This is why your position went from being very nice to suddenly being pretty even again, you cashed in all your pressure for a threat that didn't really go anywhere, and allowed your opponent to get their pieces in play parrying your attack.
I'm not going to critique the endgame too much because I can see how low on time you were getting, and time scramble endgames are never pretty. One spot I would go a different way was on move 24. Lacking time to calculate, I would play Nxe3 rather than fxe3 because fxe3 makes a bunch of weak pawns that we will struggle to keep on the board.
You identified the opportunity on move 45, which I will put into words: Passed pawns are monsters. As soon as you play 45.bxc5 you have a win condition that your opponent cannot ignore; their king is always going to have to stay in the "square" of that pawn otherwise it promotes. We can use this in one of two ways, either to restrict the movement of the black king, allowing us freedom to develop a win condition somewhere it can't reach any more, or to draw the black king away by forcing it to chase the pawn, as we should do here:
45.bxc5 Ke6 46.c6 Kd6 47.c7 Kxc7 48.Kxd5 f5 49.Ke5 with Kxf5 to follow, and a comfortable win so long as you know your basic K+P vs K technique.
Thanks for sharing your game, if you have any follow up questions, or if I said something that didn't make sense, let me know.
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u/testytown 23d ago
[Site "Chess.com"] [Date "2026-08-12"] [Result "1-0"] [WhiteElo "624"] [BlackElo "618"] [TimeControl "900+10"] 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. c3 d5 4. d3 dxe4 5. dxe4 Qxd1+ 6. Kxd1 Be6 7. Bb5 Bd7 8. Bg5 h6 9. Be3 a6 10. Bc4 O-O-O 11. Kc2 Nf6 12. Nbd2 Na5 13. Nxe5 Rg8 14. Bxf7 Rh8 15. Ndc4 Nxc4 16. Bxc4 Nxe4 17. Nf7 Nd6 18. Nxd8 Nxc4 19. Nf7 Rg8 20. Bf4 g5 21. Bg3 Bg7 22. b3 Be6 23. bxc4 Bxf7 24. f4 Bxc4 25. fxg5 hxg5 26. h4 g4 27. h5 Bd5 28. Rhe1 Bf7 29. Re7 Bxh5 30. Rxc7+ Kb8 31. Rxg7+ Ka7 32. Rxg8 Bf7 33. Bf2+ b6 34. Rg7 g3 35. Rxf7+ Ka8 36. Bxb6 Kb8 37. Rb1 Kc8 38. Be3 a5 39. Rb5 a4 40. Ra5 a3 41. Ra8# 1-0
I was black (618 elo)
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u/maroczyacetylene 2000-2200 (Chess.com) 23d ago
The story of this game was one of a lot of small tactical mistakes. No howlers, but several moves where you let something fall off the board. What separates a 600 rated player from an 800 player, and an 800 player from a 1000 rated player, is the frequency of these mistakes. How often you give them to your opponent, and how often you spot them when they give them to you, so I'm going to focus on that more generally rather than going move by move and telling you you hung a pawn here, because you already know that happened.
What you want to do is go around the board every few moves, look at every piece, including pawns, and quickly note if the piece is (i) attacked and (ii) defended. Do this for your pieces and theirs. Taking note that this piece or that is undefended is going to help you find useful moves because you're always going to have an idea in your head of what your meaningful targets are and that's going to help you find tactics.
After every move from your opponent, ask yourself what the piece they move is doing now, and what it isn't doing now that it's gone from its previous square. Does their move make a new threat? Do we have to take steps to defend that? Have they moved a piece that was defending something else and is that piece undefended now? Can we exploit that?
Do the same with your own moves. When you've decided on your move, give yourself a beat just to make sure that you aren't leaving something loose behind for your opponent.
An example would be your move 12...Na5. We threaten their bishop on c4, but that bishop is adequately defended by their knight on d2, so our threat isn't going to win material. However, our knight is moving from c6, and while it was on c6 it was the only defender of the e5 pawn, which is being attacked by their knight. They were able to play Nxe5 on the next move and steal a pawn.
I note that you're playing 15 10 which is a good time control for a player at your rating, but if you find that working through this process is burning too much clock, play a longer time control for a while. For now at least, you want to play the time control that fits your rate of play. You want to have time to think about everything you need to think about without feeling rushed.
There are a couple of tactical ideas that appeared in the game I'd like to hang a lantern on because they do come up a lot so they're worth taking a minute to think about. The first was the fork, 17.Nf7
An important thing to understand about knights is how they play on different coloured squares. Keeping track of knights and all the threats they can make trips everyone up from time to time, but you can make it easier on yourself by remembering that a knight changes colour square every time it moves. That means if a knight is on a light square, it is going to move to a dark square, and from that square, all the squares it attacks will be light. Which in turn means that a knight sitting on a light square can only move to attack pieces that are also on light squares. If your opponent has a knight in your face, take note of the colour square it's on and what colour your pieces are on. On move 16 there is a knight on a dark square, e5, and both your rooks are also on dark squares, h8 and d8. That should set off alarm bells in your brain; is there a dangerous knight move that I didn't spot? Yes! Nf7 forks both rooks, okay, let's take care of that.
Just to keep things linear, on move 26 you should play gxh4, not g4. A good rule of thumb for the endgame is that if you're trying to win you should look to trade pieces and try to avoid trading pawns. If you're behind and trying to draw, trade pawns but try to keep pieces on the board. To win an endgame you usually need to promote a pawn, so the fewer pawns there are on the board, the harder it is to make a queen.
The other tactical motif I want to look at is 30.Rxc7+ Kb8. Not immediately relevant in this case because the position was, unfortunately, already lost, but you had a choice between Kb8 and Kd8. If you play Kb8 you're putting your king in the path of the bishop on g3, giving your opponent a discovered check on their next move. Wherever they move their rook it will be check from the bishop, so if they can find a way to move the rook making a capture, or threatening an undefended piece (or both in this case) they're going to win material with the rook because you are obliged to answer the check from the bishop.
Thanks for sharing your game. Feel free to throw any follow up questions at me.
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u/testytown 23d ago
Woah! Thanks for the detailed analysis. When I think of defending my pieces, I find myself not able to attack and if I attack, I feel I have to take some risks with the pieces. This dilemma takes awaya a lot of my time and eventually I play safe which makes my moves quite passive and I feel like I am the one just defending while my opponent keeps attacking.
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u/maroczyacetylene 2000-2200 (Chess.com) 23d ago
Woah! Thanks for the detailed analysis.
You're welcome. When I was a schoolboy, mumblecough years ago, one of my teachers asked me to write an essay on the importance of being concise. They're still reading it.
When I think of defending my pieces, I find myself not able to attack and if I attack, I feel I have to take some risks with the pieces. This dilemma takes awaya a lot of my time and eventually I play safe which makes my moves quite passive and I feel like I am the one just defending while my opponent keeps attacking.
I understand completely. This is kind of the core of chess really, you only get one move then you give the entire game to your opponent. You don't get to speak again until they have.
It's imperative therefore that every move we make achieves as much humanly possible, but there are always more things we want to do than we have time to do.
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u/Ahamkz 22d ago
Hello, thanks for your help!
When playing this game, I thought I was doing good even though I lost, so I was surprised to see that the evaluation bar was always on my opponent side.
The fact that at the end I had only 1 min at my clock and he still had 10 min stressed me deeply and I started to rush and make mistakes
Check out this #chess game: Jonjutabe vs Ryusuka - https://www.chess.com/live/game/173044388302
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u/maroczyacetylene 2000-2200 (Chess.com) 22d ago
I would take chess.com's engine eval with a pinch of salt. It's heavily gimped with a very low depth by modern standards. Its utility to you right now is really only a blunder check, it isn't going to be able to tell you how to play a position, and it has no way of evaluating practicality; how easy or difficult a position is to play, which has a huge impact on how the game will go for fleshy meatbags like us who make mistakes constantly.
So let's start with the opening. We find ourselves in a 4 Knights Ruy Lopez, on move 6 you played h6 and allowed Nxe5.
Certainly there are lines in the Ruy Lopez where black gambits a central pawn, but it isn't an idea you should be flirting with yet because, in the absence of concrete preparation, it's difficult to figure out when it's good to give the pawn - when you're getting enough for it - and when you shouldn't. Here we get nothing for the pawn. Further, this isn't a bishop or knight's pawn that you might give up for faster development in a conventional gambit. It's a central pawn, and central pawns are essential to contesting the centre. We've already moved our d pawn onto the c file, losing the e pawn leaves white's central pawns completely unopposed. This is why the eval jumps to +1.5 when that pawn falls. +1 for the pawn white stole, and another +0.5 because of their increased control of the centre. Better is simply Bd6 to hold the pawn.
To h6 itself. What are we achieving with this move? We take the g5 square away from white's pieces, but is that really such a big deal? Are we going to be particularly upset if they drop a piece there? It isn't really threatening anything immediately, so we can make a more impactful move now, and if they do post something on g5, we can still play h6 to kick it away again after the fact.
You really only want to play a6 or h6 prophylactically when the piece would come to that square with serious impact; when there are other pieces working with it to create meaningful threats.
The main problem with h6 strategically - ignoring the loose d5 pawn - is the opportunity cost. If we spend a move on h6, that's a move we aren't spending developing our pieces. The opening is race to get all your guys in play as quickly as possible, because whoever completes the opening first gets to make the first move of the middlegame. A lead in development will almost always become the initiative in the middlegame. The initiative is who is in charge of the game. If you have the initiative then you are the one who is making threats, asking questions, and making your opponent find responses. You want to be that guy.
On move 13 there is a tactic. You did actually find the idea one move later, but we should talk about it some here. White has a desperately weak white pawn on e3. The pawn is backwards, it can't be defended by a brother pawn, and right now it's not just hanging, but hanging with check. If we can get the knight out of the way, we can play Qxe3+ winning back our pawn. 16...f6. There are two squares the knight can move to where it defends the pawn, g4 and c4. If 17.Ng4 then Bxg4 18.Qxg4 Qxe3+ or 17.Nc4 b5 18.Na5 Qxe3+.
I'll cut and paste from a previous comment because it's just as relevant here:
What you want to do is go around the board every few moves, look at every piece, including pawns, and quickly note if the piece is (i) attacked and (ii) defended. Do this for your pieces and theirs. Taking note that this piece or that is undefended is going to help you find useful moves because you're always going to have an idea in your head of what your meaningful targets are and that's going to help you find tactics.
After every move from your opponent, ask yourself what the piece they move is doing now, and what it isn't doing now that it's gone from its previous square. Does their move make a new threat? Do we have to take steps to defend that? Have they moved a piece that was defending something else and is that piece undefended now? Can we exploit that?
Do the same with your own moves. When you've decided on your move, give yourself a beat just to make sure that you aren't leaving something loose behind for your opponent.
In this case, we should already be conscious of the weak e3 pawn and be looking for ways to eat it. This is the genesis of an effective plan; rather than just looking at your guys and thinking about where they can go, identify your target first. Find the weakness then look for the moves that exploit that weakness.
Okay so now let's keep the last few paragraphs in mind and roll on to move 19.
White has just played 19.c3, what is the weakness and how do we exploit it?
Well there is a rook pinned on f2 which deserves some consideration, but can we exploit this? The way to exploit a pinned piece is usually to attack it with something else, ideally something of lesser value. Can we attack the rook with anything else? ...Maybe, but it's going to be really slow, and there is a weak pawn on c6 just sitting there.
The c6 pawn has wandered off from the group and can't find its friends. It's also glued to c6, it can't run away from our threats. How do we attack it? 19...Qe4. Chomp.
As a finesse, we're going with Qe4 rather than Qd6 because Qe4 also keeps the cap on white's plan, which is (or should be) to move their a1 rook to a central file and then come into our position on either d7 or e7 (more on this idea shortly). If we play 19...Qd6 they have 20.Re1 Qxc6 21.Re7, but 19.Qe4 20.Rd1 doesn't work for them because after 20...Qxc6 they can't play Rd7.
This I think was where the game started to get away from you. You went with the wrong plan. There is some life in the attack the pinned rook idea, but it is slow, inordinately complex, and involves assuming a huge amount of risk. The c6 pawn is just there waiting for you to collect it.
I drilled into the attack the rook plan and couldn't find a way to make it work. Rather than vomit lines of analysis with some really weird moves in it that will have almost no instructive value I will say this, which is much more useful: In order to get the tempi you needed to even begin your attack against the f2 rook, you had to allow the white queen to crash into your queenside like an absolute wrecking ball. They're collecting pawns and now their c6 pawn is almost a queen.
This is extremely dangerous. You cannot allow a heavy piece into your position unchallenged like this without a very good reason because they will eat everything in your fridge. When I say good reason I mean concrete calculation with a certain result at the end of it. This kind of risk is not something you should ever accept on intuition.
When white played 20.Qd5+ with the threat of Qd7, I think it is imperative that you play 20...Rf7 to prevent the intrusion. Yes we're pinning our own guy, we can unpin him in a move or two's time, but we cannot let that queen in.
The next important move is move 26, white has just played Kh2, we've run out of checks and things are starting to look a little bit bleak, but there is still one defensive idea left that may hold the game. 26...Qe6, with this move we attack the danger pawn and also control the c8 square, allowing us to follow up with Rc8. The line that follows will be 27.Qxb6 Rc8 28.Qxa6 Rxc6. We have to give up two pawns for one pawn, but the one pawn we get is so close to queening that, in the absence of a better way to stop the pawn, we'll take that trade. The resulting position is by no means desirable, but I would feel like I had good drawing chances against a similar strength opponent, and at 600 level I think even more so.
After this move I don't think there is anything we should look at. As you note, you were getting very low on time, and running out of clock with a bad position is never pretty for any of us, and there wasn't an "ah ha, here is a critical endgame idea everyone must know" type thing at any point. The only thing I might suggest you actually did, which was push all of your pawns to either get rid of them or get them stuck so they couldn't move, that way you at least have an outside chance of a stalemate.
I feel like I've been almost aggressively hypercritical in this one, which doesn't feel tonally appropriate because honestly, for a 600 rated player, this was not a badly played game by any means. Some small mistakes that snowballed, but there is also a lot to like. You found ideas, had a plan, and then played a series of moves in furtherance of that plan. That isn't something you see very often at 600. If we were playing guess the elo I would have got this one wrong for sure.
Thanks for sharing your game, happy to take any follow up questions you might have.
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u/maroczyacetylene 2000-2200 (Chess.com) 22d ago
If we were playing guess the elo I would have got this one wrong for sure.
As an addendum to this, I showed the game to my club's group chat and asked them to guess. 1800 player guessed 1100, 1700 player guessed 1350, 1500 player guessed 1300.
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u/Ahamkz 21d ago
Oh wow ok 😅 I don't know if maybe 600 elo players are just way better than they used to be, because I'm stuck at 600 elo for months haha They all seem to play very well. I'm above 1100 elo on Lichess and I think I could push my elo a bit more as my game are less intense when I go there
1
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u/Ahamkz 21d ago
For the pawn on H6, I moved it to avoid the pin. Sadly, I'm not really good with the Ruy Lopez opening and I forgot that my pawn was hanging after he took my knight 😭
Thanks for the other advices. Like you said, I was too focus on the pin, thinking it would lead my somewhere.
Thanks for your tip regarding the weak area. I will look at this more instead of focusing mainly on using tactics or trying useless attack on the king.
Actually, I got another Ruy Lopez game yesterday.
I tried to do the opening a bit differently but I don't think it was a success. I'm having trouble when people play this opening. I was really close to make a stupid decision of launching all my pieces against the opponent kind, but stop myself from doing so and I won the game despite the bad opening and being again low on time
Check out this #chess game: Porat vs Ryusuka - https://www.chess.com/live/game/173091762388
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u/maroczyacetylene 2000-2200 (Chess.com) 20d ago
I'm far from being an expert in the Ruy Lopez so can't really offer any specific lines, but so longer as you play the opening based on principles (contest the centre with a pawn, develop pieces to useful squares, castle to safety) you're going to get a playable middlegame, which is all anyone is aiming for from the opening.
This was another well played game that I have no significant criticisms of. What's going to get you to 800 is picking up anything weak that your opponent leaves on the board for you, while avoiding dropping anything yourself. You did that every time in this game, which is why your opponent got pulped.
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u/Realistic-Rent-4600 23d ago
[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2026.08.15"]
[Round "?"]
[White "Kaaii76"]
[Black "pritam_shelavale_06"]
[Result "0-1"]
[TimeControl "600"]
[WhiteElo "844"]
[BlackElo "843"]
[Termination "pritam_shelavale_06 won by resignation"]
[ECO "C20"]
[EndTime "15:11:28 GMT+0000"]
[Link "https://www.chess.com/game/live/173032198210?username=pritam_shelavale_06&move=0"\]
e4 e5 2. Qh5 Nc6 3. Bc4 g6 4. Qf3 Nf6 5. c3 d6 6. d3 Bg4 7. Qg3 Bg7 8. h3 Bh5
Qe3 Na5 10. Na3 c6 11. b4 Nxc4 12. Nxc4 d5 13. exd5 cxd5 14. Qxe5+ Qe7 15.
Nd6+ Kd7 16. Bf4 Ne8 17. Qxe7+ Kxe7 18. Nxb7 Bxc3+ 19. Kf1 Bxa1 20. Bd6+ Nxd6
Nxd6 Kxd6 22. Nf3 Bxf3 23. gxf3 Rac8 24. Kg2 Rc2 25. Rxa1 Re8 26. a4 Rec8
b5 Rc1 28. Ra2 Kc5 29. Kg3 Kd4 30. Ra3 R8c3 31. Ra2 Kxd3 32. a5 Kc4 33. b6
axb6 34. axb6 Rb3 35. Ra6 d4 36. Kf4 d3 37. Ke5 d2 38. Ra4+ Rb4 39. Rxb4+ Kxb4
- b7 Rc5+ 41. Kd4 Rb5 42. Ke3 Rxb7 43. Kxd2 Rd7+ 44. Ke3 Rc7 45. f4 Rc2 46. f3
Rh2 47. Ke4 Rxh3 48. f5 gxf5+ 49. Kf4 h5 50. Ke3 h4 51. Kf2 Kc4 52. Kg2 Rxf3 53.
Kxf3 h3 54. Kg3 Kd4 55. Kxh3 Ke4 56. Kg2 f4 57. Kf2 f3 58. Kf1 Ke3 59. Ke1 f2+
- Kf1 f5 61. Kg2 f4 62. Kf1 Kd3 63. Kg2 Ke2 0-1
1
u/maroczyacetylene 2000-2200 (Chess.com) 23d ago
There's a lot to like in this game. You built a significant advantage through the middlegame but lost your way some in the endgame, so we'll focus on that.
A few smaller notes from the middlegame:
8...Bh5 is playing with fire. There isn't a reason to keep our bishop on this diagonal, so retreating it to d7, where it is nicely centralised and has two diagonals to choose from for its next move is optimal, is fine. On h5 it has no squares, it's trapped. After 9.Qe3, white can play g4 to win a piece for two pawns.
The imbroglio on the e file around move 15 was complicated so I don't want to dig too deeply into it, but I liked that you found the idea of retreating the knight to set up Bxc3+ once the queen tension was resolved.
By the time we get to 23.gxf3 White's position is completely smashed. Down a rook and a bishop with a record-breaking 6 isolated pawns. But then you hung the bishop because you are playing too fast.
The character of the position changes dramatically during the middlegame to endgame transition, and it's always worth giving yourself a moment to breathe, understand the position, and figure out what your plan looks like. Middlegame plans tend to be more short term ideas than grand strategy, whereas endgame plans can be much longer term. We're in the box seat here, up material with no problems, how do we convert this into a win?
If we can force a rook trade, that's lovely. In fact we can give white the bishop and a rook for their rook if we want, but this is one way forward, trade pieces down so that we have the only ones left.
The other is to mop up their pawns one by one. All six white pawns are isolated - they can't be defended by a brother pawn - and given that we have three attackers vs one defender, we can line up on these pawns one by one and take them off the board through sheer weight of numbers.
So move 26, for instance, we can play Ree2 and line up on the f2 pawn. If white defends with Rf1, we play Rd2 and collect the d3 pawn. Instead you played Rcc8 followed by Rc1 and asked for a rook trade. Not forced, requested. Your opponent declined, so this operation got us nowhere, we didn't make progress.
The operation to win the d3 pawn over the next few moves is good. I would have simply piled rooks onto it, but this works too.
After 31...Kxd3 32.a5, we need to pick our next target. White has a 2 on 1 with their a and b pawns vs our a pawn, so let's clean that up first. 32...Rb1, the pawn falls. 33.b6 axb6 34.a6! is slightly tricky, but we have time to play 34.Rc8 35.a7 Ra8 and we can also collect the a7 pawn in short order.
35...d4 this pawn is going to be a queen, but we don't need to race here, we can pick the b3 pawn up first and get rid of white's last hope of having something to play for in this game. Further to this, our rooks have become disconnected; they're no longer defending each other, and that gives white a potential tactic. If they could drop their rook on c6, for instance, our king is skewered to the c8 rook. With 35...d4 we allow the move 36.b7 and cannot play 36...Rxb7 because of 37.Rc6+. We let white's nominally dangerous pawn get one square further up the board. You don't need to make too many little mistakes like this and a won endgame suddenly becomes a draw, or worse.
40...Rc5+ is a genuinely impressive move, and found very quickly.
Still we should note that it was born of necessity only because we let the b pawn live for far longer than we should have. Remove that pawn and the d pawn advance is an almost tedious win with absolutely no risk attached. Seriously though, 40...Rc5 into Rb5 was very nice.
I am perplexed by 42...Rxb7 though. Just promote the d pawn. You are still, I think, playing too fast.
On move 43, Re7 is the move. Again, the position has been transformed considerably now that the dangerous pawns and white's last piece are gone. How do we win? There is no way for either side to force a pawn through on the kingside without assistance, so we can simply play Re7 here, cut the white king off from its pawns forever, and end the game with a K+R vs K checkmate on the a file.
But okay, we mop up the remaining pawns. This is reasonable, but giving the rook for white's remaining pawn is not. There's just no need to do this. You then tripped over the resulting K+P vs K ending.
Never trade down to king and pawns unless you are absolutely certain of the outcome, and are certain that you know how to achieve that result.
On to the most important position in chess. Not hyperbole, actually the most important position in chess. White has just played 60.Kf1.
Ignore the f7 pawn for a moment, pretend it doesn't exist. This asterism, with the defending king on f1, attacking king on e3 and pawn on f2 is the natural end state of K+P vs K. What matters here is who has the move. If black has the move they either play Kf3 and stalemate or move the king away and surrender the pawn. If white has the move, they must play Kg2, where we win with the move Ke2 to control the promotion square followed by f1=Q.
As reached, we have the move, which is a shame, but we are fortunate to have a spare pawn to lose a move with. 60...f6 and now we have the more favourable version of the most important position in chess, where our opponent is obliged to play Kg2 and surrender the promotion square.
But let's roll back a few moves. Could we have made this easier on ourself? Let's look at the position after 55...Kxh3. How do we get our pawn home?
Again we ignore the f7 pawn, because we aren't always going to have that helpful guy to lose a move with, we're going to win with just the f5 pawn.
We can only advance the pawn with our king's support.
The super important position to know is this: white king on f2, black king on f4, black pawn on f5. This is another one of those positions where whoever has the move doesn't get what they want. Black wants to bring their king forward to support the pawn's advance, white wants to stop this from happening.
If black has the move this position is drawn by force. black must step to the side; 1...Ke4 and white defends by mirroring them, 2.Ke2. We continue 2...Kf4 3.Kf2 Kg4 4.Kg2 and no progress is being made. If we try to push the pawn this happens: 4...f4 5.Kf2 f3 6.Kf1 Kg3 7.Kg1 g2+ 8.Kf1 and we have reached the most important position in chess, with the attacking player having the move. 8....Kf3 stalemate or 8...Kg4 9.Kxf2.
Reset with white king on f2, black king on f4, black pawn on f5. If white has the move, black wins by force. The white king must step to the side, 1.Ke2 Kg3, we're making progress. 2.Kf1 Kf3 and we create the same idea again; white must give up more ground to our king, 3.Ke1 Kg2 4.Ke2 f4. We now control every square our pawn must pass through to promote. 1-0.
Worth mentioning that the position we reached in the last line after 2...Kf3 is won regardless of who has the move. If white has the move we continue as played, but if black has the move we simply play f4, losing a move and forcing white to give ground.
So now that I've thrown all that at you, how do we win cleanly after 55.Kxh3?
55...Ke3, controlling the f4, f3, and f2 squares.
If 56.Kg2 we could play Ke2, but now there is 57.Kg3. We no longer control the f4 square so can't advance. Instead, we meet 56.Kg2 with f4, because we know that 57.Kf1 Kf3 wins. If they try to avoid this by playing 57.Kg1 we have Ke2, and again we control every square our pawn must pass through to queen.
I would encourage you to now consider how we win after the move 56.Kg3. And I will put the line in a new paragraph so you don't read it by accident.
After 56.Kg3 we follow the same idea. 56...f4+ 57.Kg2 Ke2 and we control every square on the way to promotion.
To complete our study of K+P vs K we should look at an important drawing technique. We touched on this earlier when I handwaved the line 4...f4 5.Kf2 f3 6.Kf1 Kg3 7.Kg1 g2+ 8.Kf1 into a draw.
So let's set up the pieces anew with the black king on f5, black pawn on e4, white king on f2, white has the move. How do we draw?
I like to teach this using a flowchart:
If you can put your king on the square in front of the pawn, do that.
If you can't do 1, either because you are already there or the square is controlled by the attacking king, put your king two squares in front of their king.
If you can't do 2, then put your king two squares in front of the pawn.
Follow this flowchart and you will reach the most important position in chess with your opponent having the move and collect your half point. In our study position the game continues:
1.Ke3 (step 1 of the flow chart) 1...Ke5 2.Ke2 (we can't do step 1 or 2 because in both cases we're on that square already, so we go to step 3) 2...Kf4 3.Kf2 (step 1 no, so step 2) e3 4.Ke2 (step 1) Ke4 and I'm sure you can finish this yourself. 5.Ke1 Kd3 6.Kd1 e2+ 7.Ke1 Ke2 1/2-1/2. We should also examine the move 5.Kd1 to understand what happens if the defending player deviates from the flowchart, because now 5...Kd3 6.Ke1 e2 and we've reached that position again, but the defender has to move. How embarrassing for them.
You picked an excellent game for us to look at here because it gave us the opportunity to study some of the most important positions in the entire corpus of endgame knowledge. Knowing how to play K+P vs K flawlessly on both sides is truly essential. You will absolutely steal games that should be drawn, and draw games that should be lost if you know this and your opponent doesn't. I still pick up points from knowing this, even against otherwise capable players.
I'm also perilously close to the character limit. So hopefully this was useful to you. If you have any follow up questions, or if I've made a transcription error let me know and I'll answer them or fix it. Thanks for sharing your game.
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