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Our first article, A mad rook rampage, started with a recent game between Jorden van Foreest and Taimour Radjabov, where the outplayed Dutch GM had saved himself with a dolle toren , a mad rook. The second article, Mario Matous s Mad Queen, showed a similar theme for a defending queen. Finally we had an article entitled Mad bishops and knights. In that article the question arose: can pawns become similarly suicidal?
To this generally asked question Frits Fritschy wrote: I haven t found any crazy pawn studies, but if they exist, they probably are versions of the excelsior theme (pawn goes from the second row to the eighth row). After an hour or so, I came to the following position, that is far too crude to call it a study, but it shows one idea.
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Study of the Month: February 2021
Although many other endgame study composers created pawn endgames, two were outstanding. I wrote an extensive article on Nikolay Grigoriev in April 2018, based on the research of Sergey N. Tkachenko. The same researcher’s writing also provides valuable insight into the life of the other pawn-endgame master, Mikhail Zinar.
There are small joys that I look forward to when receiving magazines, and one of those joys was to browse for endgame studies by Mikhail Zinar. His ever-interesting ideas, his incredible mastery of pawn endgames, and his ease to create task problems (we will look at those next month) made his endgame studies always worth replaying in my head. Sometimes it would just be a slight smile at recognizing a familiar idea, sometimes it would be astonishment at an outrageous construction (in the good sense of the words).