Pawn Endgame Chess Homework

In June of 2008, I returned to the San Francisco Bay Area after working on a two year chess study in the Bakersfield area. Before leaving for Kern County, I was the most successful chess coach in Silicon Valley. However, upon returning several other fine chess instructors had filled the vacuum that I left when I moved to Bakersfield for the chess study.

Right away, I noticed that the Cal North youth chess scene continued to flourish in my absence and that loads of kids were playing the aggressive openings I had helped popularize a few years prior. Before long, I was hired by Joe Lonsdale as a coach for his Mission San Jose Elementary School chess team in Fremont. MSJE was ironically was the town rival of the Weibel Elementary School chess team I had worked for before leaving for Bakersfield. Some of the most popular coaches in the area now worked at Weibel so it was a unique opportunity for me to coach against the chess teachers who replaced me while I was gone. 

The opening’s choices being taught at Weibel were aggressive and had several key traps. So my first course of action at MSJE was to teach these opening traps and how to avoid them. This, coupled with regular tactical training, would give MSJE the upper hand when playing Weibel. However, it was the endgame training that I did with my star students that set the stage for MSJE’s dominance over Weibel.

In 2013, I shared a page of my endgame chess homework publicly on this blog. However, the page I shared was just one part of a series of endgame homework assignments that I gave and reviewed with my students at MSJE. Below, I am posting another installment of this now famous series on pawn endgames that helped Mission San Jose Elementary School win several US Chess National Elementary School Championships. Of course these assignments were designed to strengthen a student’s understanding of opposition, distant opposition, triangulation, key squares, KQKP (King and Queen vs. King and pawn) techniques and zugzwang which I had already introduced them to in class. If you are unsure how to introduce these topics to your child, please feel free to email me (dailychessmusings@gmail.com) and I will be happy to assist you with further information about teaching the basics of King and pawn endgames.

All puzzles below are white to move and win.