How can I learn to play better chess?

[Frylock]

@Chronos

Really? It seems to me that you ought to be able to play it more-or-less like King and Rook vs. King, and just keep your king and rook off of the bishop’s color. Eventually, your opponent might be able to use the bishop to block, but then it seems like you ought to be able to force a capture of the bishop, at which point it’s the textbook ending.

I suspect it’s because in the King and Rook v King ending, the winning player only wins because of Zugzwang. In K and R v K and B, that might not apply–the second player can move his bishop instead of his king.

[glee]

@Chronos

Really? It seems to me that you ought to be able to play it more-or-less like King and Rook vs. King, and just keep your king and rook off of the bishop’s color. Eventually, your opponent might be able to use the bishop to block, but then it seems like you ought to be able to force a capture of the bishop, at which point it’s the textbook ending.

Consider a Black King on g8, hemmed in by a White Rook on a7. So far so good.
Now put a black bishop on b1 (guarding g6). The White king can’t go to g6. Since he can’t do that (the best the White King can do is to reach f6 or h6), whenever White checks, the Black King can escape to either f7 or h7.
And if White makes a waiting move (e.g. Rc7), Black makes a waiting move (e.g. Bd3).

And here’s where it gets even more interesting (which is why I said ‘unless the attacker can force the defender’s King into a corner square the same colour as the bishop’).

White: King on h6, Rook on b8
Black: King on h8 :eek: , Bishop on g8.

The bishop has been forced to block (as you wanted above), but White has no good move. If he doesn’t unpin the bishop, it’s stalemate. if he does unpin the bishop, it can move away and then return to g8.
Draw.

@Chronos

One other point, by the way: Forking a couple of high-value pieces (King and Rook, say) is very sexy, but doesn’t come up all that often (practically speaking, never more than once per game, because if you can force something like that, you’ve pretty much won). But the same principle can apply to more prosaic gains. If you can make a move that both threatens something valuable and improves your position, you’ve gained that improvement in position essentially for free, since your opponent is forced to waste es move responding to your threat. Gaining a slightly better position isn’t as decisive as gaining a material advantage, but jockeying for position makes up most of the game.

Again this is all true in theory.
The difficulty is reaching the sort of positions where these strong moves are now available!