Monday, June 8, 2009

“Do Not Hurry” vs Complexity

This standard bit of endgame advice is fairly ludicrous in this game. All sorts of things are decided by a single tempo. But with this in mind, maybe we can use “Do Not Hurry” as a test for developing a scale of complexity for endgames:
1) In the simplest endings, “Do Not Hurry” does not apply, as you can simply count out what you should do (straight-ahead pawn races for example). In these endgames it’s quite clear who has the advantage, and what each side needs to do.
2) Add a bit more complexity, and “Do Not Hurry” starts to apply, but these are all positions where nothing much is going on, and the critical task is coordinating responses to fairly low-urgency threats.
3) At a higher level still, you have something like this game, where each tempo matters, and both players are working with threats that are quite urgent.

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