page_title: Rook and bishop versus rook endgame
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Rook and bishop versus rook endgame / History
caption_attribution_description: English: w:François-André Danican Philidor. Français&#160;: François-André Danican Philidor.
context_page_description: The rook and bishop versus rook endgame is a chess endgame where one player has just a rook, bishop and king, and the other player has only a rook and king. It has been studied many times through the years. This combination of material is one of the most common pawnless chess endgames. It is generally a theoretical draw, but the rook and bishop have good winning chances in practice because the defense is difficult. Ulf Andersson won the position twice within a year, once against a grandmaster and once against a candidate master; and grandmaster Keith Arkell has won it 18 times out of 18. In positions that have a forced win, up to 59 moves are required. Tony Kosten has seen the endgame many times in master games, with the stronger side almost always winning. Pal Benko called this the "headache ending".
  Being a five-piece endgame, the rook and bishop versus rook endgame has been fully analysed using computers. Endgame tablebases show that 40.1% of the legal positions with this material are theoretical wins, but that includes many unnatural positions that are unlikely to occur in games.
context_section_description: In 1749 François-André Danican Philidor (1726–1795) published a position in which the superior side can force a win.  Giambattista Lolli (1698–1769) studied a similar position with a forced win.  On the other hand, there are several drawing techniques possible if a winning position such as the Philidor position has not been reached.  The Cochrane Defense was discovered by John Cochrane (1798–1878), the Szén position was discovered by József Szén (1805–1857), and there is the second-rank defense.  Other winning and drawing positions were studied by Tassilo von Heydebrand und der Lasa, Josef Kling and Kuiper, and André Chéron (Nunn 2002:178–86).
  Many of the longest chess games on record involve this endgame since at one time the fifty-move rule under which a draw could be claimed after fifty moves with no capture was extended to one-hundred moves for this combination of material.  For example, the longest tournament game on record is a 269-move game by Ivan Nikolić and International Master Goran Arsović.  The last 103 moves had this material and the game ended in a draw.
  Anatoly Karpov played a rook versus rook and bishop ending in a 2003 game with 15-year-old Teimour Radjabov, which went 113 moves before an indignant Karpov claimed a draw by invoking the 50-move rule with only 14 seconds remaining on the game clock.
  In a 2016 game between Fabiano Caruana and Peter Svidler, Caruana succeeded in achieving Philidor's Position on move 102, but failed to take advantage of the situation and the game ended in a draw 16 moves later.
caption: Philidor
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