Daily Chess Improvement: Insanely Hard Endgame!

Thank you Yancey...I think I will put it on a engine tommorrow hopefully and learn the patterns.

I had to hunt in my memory for an ending like this, and the only one I could think of was a Kasparov vs Karpov game from the 1990 Championship match round 16. Kasparov won the ending with a mating attack. However, the situation was different because both players had a pawn faced off on the g-file at g6 and g5, so there wasn't much to learn from it.

I took deeper look at the problem in the Nalimov Tablebase, and here is my impression- white uses mate threats initially to dislodge the arrangement where the bishop protects the knight- once this is accomplished, the two black pieces are vulnerable- for example in the open board, the superior arrangement is for the bishop to protect the night since this puts both on dark squares and the white bishop has no target to aim for, but when black is forced to protect the bishop with the knight, things are less comfortable for black since it allows white to attack the knight with the bishop, and if black has the bishop attacked by the rook, the bishop or knight is lost. Indeed, in the open board, I am quite comfortable hunting the black pieces this way- it makes perfect sense to me. However, my problem is the black king- if black works to keep the pieces nearby the king, such double attacks are harder to work through.

Surpriselover- 1.Kb5 Kd8 2.Bc6 Kc8 3.Ra8?! Kc7! and now what for white? I will give you hint since I have looked this over already in the Nalimov- after 3. ....Kc7, white is in a win 73 moves version whereas with 1.Kc5, it is win in 46.

Nicely done, Alena. I don't know if you saw the earlier comment, but it was Susan's posting of that problem with the two knights vs the king and pawn that reminded me of this puzzle, and it is why I gave it to you.