
Philidor’s Legacy
Philidor was a very strong chess player who lived between 1726 and 1795. He made a lot of contributions to chess including:
- The importance of looking after your pawn structure
- Philidor’s Defence which starts 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 d6
- Analysis of some very important rook and pawn endings.
He was also famous for Philidor’s Legacy. This is a tactic that comes up surprisingly often in games. It is both useful and very pretty!
A few things to note:
- The knight can start on d6, e5 as well as g5 in this position
- if the rook was on f8 then black’s best move is to give up the rook for the knight; that loses material but avoids mate
- If black has a queen on the back rank instead of a rook it doesn’t work. The black queen would be on g8 at the end and black would just play Qxf7.
21st February 2020 |
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