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USING ENEMY PAWNS Home | Traps | Openings | Endgames | Puzzles | Library | About me In Joint Kings, we have discussed the possibility of using your own pieces to separate the kings. However, often, players are unable to attain such advantage. One key idea in Atomic Chess, is to use the enemy pieces against them. Lets see how this works. We will begin with R-Pp-Kk (Pp denotes the pawns are on the same file and black's pawn is blocking white's pawn). The setup is the following: white's rook is horizontally 2 away from the enemy pawn and the kings must be "below" black's pawn. The idea here is that white's king walks between his rook and the enemy pawn.  White to move: white walks between the line of fire. The solution is simple: 1. Kd5 Kc4. Now, white have a choice. The Runaway tactic requires 2 rows above black's pawn (2. Ke6 Kd5 3. Kf7 and black's king cannot follow). The more elegant Trapdoor tactic always works: 2. Kd6 Kd5 3. Kc6! and black are demolished the following move. At times, white don't even have a blocking pawn, and must use other means. We shall consider King/Queen vs King/Pawn. Clearly if black are able to promote, the game is drawn. The next worst position is when the queen blocks the pawn one step away from promotion, in my notation, its Qp2-Kk. In general this is a draw (basically black should "try" to keep his king one higher than white's king). In all other positions, white are able to block with their king. These all win for white. We quickly go over the variations. We will start with Q-Kp2k (the kings are joined, and white's king is blocked by a pawn on the second rank):  Black to move: oh wait, they must. Another annoying special case is the b-file. The general setup is as follows:  White to move: the tunnel method against b-pawn. If black's king is on a5, then Ka3 wins. Otherwise, white play 1. Ka5 Kb4 (or 1... Ka4, doesn't make a difference), 2. Kb6 Ka5 3. Kc6 Kb6 4. Kd5 and black are done for. This could have been made shorter by playing 3. Kc7 instead; however, this (tunnel) method allows for the black pawn standing on b7. Of course, there is even another special case, when black's pawn is on b2, white's king iss on b1, and black's king is on a1 or a2. Here, white places his queen on a3, then moves out Kc2-d1 or Kc2-d3 depending on whether black's king is on b3 or b1. We call this tactic a crosshatch. Well lets move on to the general case when black's pawn is on the a, c, d or symmetrical files:  White to move: crosshatch method to separate kings. Here white play 1. Ke5! Now, if black respond 1... Kd4 then 2. Kf6, or 1... Kd6 2. Kf4 d4 3. Kf3! and the kings are separated, and it doesn't matter whether the queen is on the first rank or not. |
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