There are 3 key moves you need to understand in order to win this no matter what your opponent does. Firstly you want to promote your most advanced pawn(the a pawn). Bring the king to defend and then your rook is free to move. If your opponent refuses to move off the a file, you can put your king behind the rook using it as a shield similar to the lucena position and easily promote. The more practical way for your opponent to play to try to confuse you is if they anticipate this and maneuver their rook to keep giving back checks. This is where the second 2 keys come into play. The opponents king can not capture the other pawn because we give a check on f8 and promote. With this in mind, the opponents king can only blockade the pawn and we can safely move our rook to h8. If they capture the a pawn we skewer and win. If they resort back to giving checks we can now move our king behind the a pawn and go back to plan A. Hope this helps. I actually had to use and engine to find f6 and Rh8 because these plans are not clear based on this exercise. I did it a couple times and the computer kept putting the rook on a5 which after Kb6 loses to the first idea.
Can someone please explain this simple Rook endgame??
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Don’t forget to move your rook behind your king. Stupid but easy move.
https://www.chess.com/endgames/rook/winning-rook-endings/practice
The practice mode, 1st one. I'm up a pawn. I played it with the engine like 5 times. If the king stays close to the pawn, I draw. He moved away once and the resulting win was with these elements:
1. I had to safe-check opponent's king and not lose my Rook, basically forcing him to take my pawn (not required, required not to lose my Rook though).
2. I promote and trade his Rook for my promoed Q, left with a R. Easy win from there.
How the hell do I get into THAT position though? Any help please?