Chess Q: 3 pawns vs. Knight

The Game Room
1

King and three pawns vs King and Knight

The three pawns are on their starting squares and connected. Their king is behind them. The other king and knight are centralized but in front of them basically in the middle of the board. I just wanted to make sure whoever answers knows that theres no weird advantage going on.

So my Q is: At high levels, do you all just call it a draw right there? Or play a bit? Analysis says its a draw, but I don’t know if high level players know how to make that happen.

2

I think it would be really unusual for the GM with three pawns to agree to a draw without at least testing the waters first. I’ve seen GMs play on in a lot of theoretical draws, though not the most simple/obvious ones.

Witness the pain of Danya!

3

Though the pawns weren’t on starting squares.

4

I thought a knight and king couldn’t ever produce mate. If that’s the case what do you have to lose going for the win with pawns?

5

I don’t think this is technically true with other pieces on the board. Pretty sure firouzja lost a game because he times out and it was theoretically possible for his opponent to mate him if practically impossible.

6

I mean, hypothetically possible, but highly unlikely. Highly, highly unlikely.

Imgur

7

Yeah, I should have remembered smothered mates are a thing.
Except in your example the white king is in check.

8

Not if the board is from blacks perspective.

9

Yeah, I was just trying to measure how ‘automatic’ this is at high levels. If Danya messes it up…then its probably not very automatic.

In the game I played that made me think to ask…after I analyzed it, you have to send your knight off into the hinterlands to swing it back to get to the right spot. Something that would never occur to me.

10

As an experienced player (FIDE Master), I would be very confident of holding the draw, even against a grandmaster.
The key thing would be that I know all positions where K+P v K is a draw. (Basically the attacking King needs to be in front of its pawn - and even then it can depend on whose move it is.)
So I would be looking to either blockade or sacrifice my knight for two pawns, transposing into a drawn ending.

11

You specifically would, but would you be confident of any given Master-rank player doing the same? Even at the same overall level of skill, not everyone has the same set of skills, and there are even some grandmasters whose endgame skills are lacking.

12

Yes, I would expect all such strong players to know their K+P endings.

The interesting example above (post 2) was a time scramble, so I could see the games continuing under that circumstance.

13

So after blacks move on move 40, you’d expect at very high levels with plenty of time, you’d offer a draw as white?

14

Stockfish shows white as winning in that scenario

15

When I run Stockfish I get +0.23 after black’s best move, which isn’t even a quarter pawn.

16

This site i use has it at 0.00

Note, the board is not set up, I’m just showing the site.

17

Once you get to a small number of pieces (e.g. 6), switch to endgame tablebases for 100% accuracy. :grinning:

After 40. … Nxe4, it’s a drawn position.

KPPPvKN – Syzygy endgame tablebases (syzygy-tables.info)

You can easily use the tablebase for analysis - I reckon that spending an hour or two doing that would give you a clear idea how to play the position for either side.

18

I’m a little surprised that Stockfish apparently doesn’t use endgame tablebases.

19

Chessbase sells a USB stick that contains all five-piece endings and most six-piece ones:

Endgame Turbo 5 USB flash drive (chessbase.com)

Stockfish will consult this database when appropriate, and will display the results. Fairly expensive (€179.90), though.

20

Upon viewing the Readme on this page:

GitHub - syzygy1/tb

it seems that one can configure Stockfish to use all six-piece endings for free. The skills required to do so are beyond me, though,