More About Endgames

Yesterday's endgame was interesting and showed how a winning position can be ruined by allowing your opponent to get counterplay. So I'm now beginning to trawl through the endgames and whittle them down to a manageable level, so that at our endgame camp the kids will have some decent quality examples to look at, demonstrating clear ideas. It means, however, that I have to leave some examples out.

Here was a painful lesson for me in my first major tournament in Australia, the 2005 Australian Masters. I played pretty well in the tournament scoring 5.5/9 for a 2370 performance, but started badly with a tough loss to German IM Peter Frohlich. Peter had ground me down from a Catalan, and I had defended dourly for most of the game. In the following diagram I had the brainwave of trading pawns being the best defence:

As black I played 1..a6? What did Peter play that made me resign? I'll tell you tomorrow :)

Edit: Peter came up with the well known theme 2.a5! ensuring that he would get an advanced passed pawn whatever I did. I did the best move and resigned! I will admit that while this is a well known endgame theme, to me it was totally new, showing that my endgame knowledge was seriously lacking.