Welcome to this active site. Each week I am going to present to you an endgame position for you to solve or to workout the best continuation. Computer analysis will also be considered. Some of these positions will come from actual historical games. Others will be composed endgame studies, but all the solutions will be relevant to the practical game. The new position will occur each SUNDAY and I will always be pleased to receive POSITIVE feedback about the positions and the analysis and I will try to acknowledge these where relevant.

Soviet composer of chess problems and endgame studies. Simkhovich made an original contribution to the endgame study by bringing a number of ideas from the problem world and reworking them in an endgame setting. One of his outstanding achievements was formulating and categorising the theme of the "positional draw".

In 1928` Simkhovitch wrote his ground breaking paper on the "positional draw". He mentioned about studies where a draw is obtained by the creation of an impenetrable position, a fortress. Another type is where the enemy forces find they are "bound up", i.e. they are committed to defend certain points and so are distracted away from winning. He used the above study to illustrate some of his ideas.

It is a positional draw. Black can make no progress. Harrie Grondijs has written an enjoyable book on this brilliant composer: "Works of Simkhovich" (1996?) 

1. Cumulative 2003 Prizes: 1st £100 or equivalent, 2nd £50, 3rd £30; 4th £20. (Total Prize Money=£200) Entries limited to 20 solvers. This event will run from 5/1/2003 to 22/12/2003 with a recess in July. Present rules apply but note the prizes will go to those participants who climb the ladder the greatest number of times during the year. The relative position of the solver's name on the ladder will decide the allocation of prizes.