Papageno wrote on 12/10/10 at 23:15:29:


I don't know the answer to your question, but - as a by-the-by - is the second rank defence really the 'easiest'?

Nunn (Secrets of Pawnless Endings) seems to feel that the 2nd rank and Cochrane Position methods have equal merit.

According to Nunn in Secrets of Pawnless Endings, (1994) the second-rank defence was "not mentioned in any of the classical endgame works", and only explicitly described in Batsford Chess Endings by Speelman, Tisdall and Wade (1993). I don't  have the latter book so i don't know if they claimed to be first with it.

Of course it may have been publicized through magazines earlier.

Today, I was watching the London game McShane-Kramnik where McShane held the draw in an endgame KR vs. KRB. For most of the time (almost 50 moves in this endgame) he relied on the now famous second rank defense. This method is today explained in every serious endgame book and many top level players drew and draw with it.

On the other hand, I've read several older endgame books (Mieses 1910, Cheron 1960, Awerbach 1980) where they were absolutely sure about the correct outcome of this endgame (the theoretical draw), but none of the books explained this relatively easiest method. They all gave somewhat more complicated & dangerous ways to draw.

I first read about this 2nd-rank defense in a German chess magazine (Schach-Magazin 64) around 1990 (+/- 5 yrs., I'd guess). So the question comes to my mind: Who was first to describe and publish this second rank defense? I've heard that discovering this method was somehow related to the first 5-men-tablebases. Is this true?