On 2004-04-27, Dr. David Kirkby wrote:
Certainly I have no trouble with Queen+King vs King. I can normally
acomplish that in about a dozen moves, depending on the start
position. Adding the knight into the equation made it very hard (for
me). But since it's so rare (someone stated 100 games in his database
of 1.6 million), it's clearly not worth worrying about. If it only
occurs once in every 16,000 games (on average), I don't care too much
about it.

Of course, it's not common. But the database statistics are pretty
meaningless, since they typically have games of 2000+ players who will
resign before the endgame occurs.

If you have another suggestion to practice endings with the queen
(other than queen+king vs king), I'd welcome them. I gather king+queen
vs king+rook is not easy, but I don't know how common that is (I
suspect not too uncommon), and have not tried that. I guess that is
one to practice.

It is important. Rook+pawn vs Rook is very common, and there are
situations where white can sac his rook to promote the pawn, so that Q
v R arises. I played in a tournament this weekend where I two 2000-ish
players draw it, black had an idea how to defend (trying to keep his
rook on f3 and king on g2), white did not know how to win and was in
time trouble (in this stage of the game, in my experience you're
*always* in time trouble :-)).

--
Remco Gerlich