Réti Endgame Study

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The Réti Endgame Study,

composed by Richard Réti and published in 1921 in Kagan's Neueste Schachnachrichten [1], demonstrates how a king can make multiple threats, and how it can take more than one path to a given location with the same number of moves. White to move and draw!

At the first glance it seems that White has no hope. His king is far outside the square of the black pawn and further has a long way from supporting his own pawn with the opponent king inside its square.

But the white king threatens to support his own passer, while simultaneously coming closer to the black passer's pawn square. While the black king will have to spend two tempi to stop the white passer from queening, this is the number of tempi the white king needs to gain in order to get into the square of the black passer.

Inside a chess program's evaluation, a too "rough" rule of the square implementation with huge "winning" scores will fail badly here, despite search with transposition table will solve Réti's study quickly, not to mention tablebases.

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