Lyudmil Tsvetkov wrote:arjuntemurnikar wrote:I did a quick google search and found this blog post claiming to have done statistical analysis on endgames.
This is by no means scientific proof, because the author of the analysis does not give any detailed accounts of which database he queried nor any information about his setup in general, so nobody can really verify his results independently.
But no matter, here is what he says:
"All rook endings are drawn", according to a common piece of chess folklore. We decided to distrust emotion and check the figures, comparing the percentages of draws in different types of endings, using a database of more than three million games. The results were very surprising. Bishop endings turned out to be the most drawish, with 47%. Second place went to queen endings on 43%. Even more surprising was the third place for knight endings, at 40%. And the notorious rook endings came only second-last at 38%, with pawn endings naturally turning out to be the least drawish at 27%.
The blog post is here:
http://streathambrixtonchess.blogspot.c ... dgame.html
I also found this on the chessprogramming wiki:
In 2013, John Nunn applied the 7-piece Lomonosov Tablebases to R+2P vs. R+P positions from the famous book Rook Endings, 2nd edition, by Levenfish and Smyslov [7], which was assumed to contain the truth and, owing to Nunn, this is no longer so.
...but since I don't have access to the IGCA journal, I could not read up on it. If anybody does have access and is willing to share John Nunn's findings, it would be helpful to this discussion.
This is complete BS.
You do not know what the criteria for choosing which endgames to count are.
In pawn endgames, it is very simple, you either see a win very quickly, or it is simply a draw, so you do not need stats for this, there is no WDL probability there, the author should not have included this.
The first thing a primary teaches you is that knight endgames are absolutely the same as pawn endgames, so if you are up a pawn in an knight endgame with sufficient pawn span, this is simply a win; but that is far from true for rook endgames, quite the opposite.
One pawn more in queen endings is usually easier to convert than in rook endings, so another wrong statement.
Instead of citing unsubstantiated sources, it would be better to just try one and the other idea.
Unfortunately my opponent in a correspondence game did not "understand" that rook endgames is always a draw so I had to resign because I found that rook endgame is winning for him
Here is the game(It is not a game that I started and somebody else started it and gave me a bad position and practically draw and loss were the same for my rating but I did not want to lose this game)
[pgn][Event "EU/TC9/sf3"]
[Site "ICCF"]
[Date "2011.7.15"]
[Round "-"]
[White "Blass, Uri"]
[Black "Savoca, Alfredo"]
[Result "0-1"]
[WhiteElo "2603"]
[BlackElo "2394"]
[Board "6"]
[WhiteTeam "Israel"]
[BlackTeam "Italy"]
1.Nf3 c5 2.c4 Nf6 3.Nc3 Nc6 4.d4 cxd4 5.Nxd4 e6
6.a3 Be7 7.e4 O-O 8.Nc2 b6 9.Be2 Bb7 10.O-O Qc7
11.Ne3 Ne5 12.f4 Ng6 13.e5 Ne4 14.Nb5 Qc6 15.Bf3 Nh4
16.Nd4 Qc8 17.Bxe4 Bxe4 18.Bd2 f6 19.Qg4 Bc5 20.Bc3 Nf5
21.Ndxf5 exf5 22.Qg3 fxe5 23.Bxe5 Bxe3+ 24.Qxe3 Qxc4 25.Rac1 Qf7
26.Rc7 Rfc8 27.Rfc1 Rxc7 28.Rxc7 Bc6 29.Qg3 h6 30.h3 Re8
31.h4 a5 32.Kf2 b5 33.h5 Kh7 34.Ra7 Re6 35.Ra6 g5
36.Rb6 Qxh5 37.Rb8 Qg4 38.Qxg4 fxg4 39.g3 Kg6 40.Rf8 Be4
41.Rg8+ Kh5 42.Rd8 Bc6 43.Ke3 Kg6 44.Kd3 Kf7 45.Bc7 gxf4
46.Bxf4 a4 47.Rb8 Kg7 48.Kd2 h5 49.Rd8 Re4 50.Bc7 Rd4+
51.Ke3 Rc4 52.Rb8 Re4+ 53.Kd2 Rd4+ 54.Ke2 Kf7 55.Rh8 Bf3+
56.Ke3 Re4+ 57.Kd3 Re2 58.Rxh5 Rxb2 59.Bd6 Be2+ 60.Ke3 Kg6
61.Re5 Bc4 62.Bb4 Rg2 63.Be1 d5 64.Kd4 b4 65.Bxb4 Rxg3
66.Re3 Rg1 67.Re1 Rg2 68.Ke5 Rf2 69.Re3 Rf5+ 70.Kd4 Bb3
71.Be1 Bd1 72.Bh4 Rh5 73.Bd8 Bf3 74.Re6+ Kf7 75.Re7+ Kf8
76.Re5 Rh1 77.Ke3 d4+ 78.Kf4 d3 79.Be7+ Kf7 80.Bb4 Rb1
81.Ke3 Rf1 82.Rg5 Be2 83.Bc3 Rg1 84.Ba5 Ra1 85.Bb4 Ke6
86.Kf4 Rf1+ 87.Ke4 Rb1 88.Ke3 Kf6 89.Rg8 Kf5 90.Bd6 d2
0-1[/pgn]
Note that Stockfish could not find d2 in a reasonable time and reducing the score for all rook endgames may only make it harder for it to find d2
[D]6R1/8/3B4/5k2/p5p1/P2pK3/4b3/1r6 b - - 23 90 bm d2
Maybe today stockfish is better relative to the time of the game and can find d2 faster but still it does not see d2 at least not after some minutes of search.