Welcome to our 13th lesson of chess summer school as we move from king and pawn endings to rook and pawn endings. Someone once said all rook and pawn endings are drawn mainly because people play the badly. I haven't started with really basic positions because we did that in a previous summer school. These are very practical positions and you will be testing your skill of being able to see all the way to the end. Can you you see it here? Can you see that your passed d-pawn is doomed? What's your plan--all the way to the end? Write down all the moves until it's clear that White wins.

This is from Shirov-Adams, Las Palmas, 1994 1.a4! A great move, anticipating the loss of the pawn and the transposition into a king and pawn ending. If you didn't see that, at least play the move and count out the win. 1...Kf5 2.Kf2 Ke5 3.Ke3 Rxd5 4.Rxd5+ Kxd5 5.h4! Black was a GM and knew the position was lost, so he resigned. White didn’t’ play the drawing move 5.g4? g5 5...Kc4 If it did continue, it would have gone one of two ways. The other way doesn’t work either:5...Ke5 6.h5 Kf5 7.Kd4 Kg5 8.Kc4 Kxh5 9.Kb5 Kg4 10.Kxb6 Kg3 11.Kxa5 Kxg2 12.Kb5 6.h5 Kb4 7.g4 Kxa4 8.g5 Kb3 9.h6 gxh6 10.gxh6 a4 11.h7 a3 12.h8Q 1-0

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