Carlsen and Vancura idea

Hello, guys!

All chess fans are anticipating the WC match, but in the last two days, we have all seen the battle between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana. Well, it was 960-chess, but it was chess!
After winning the first game, Magnus needed a draw in the second game to fix the match win. Finally, he did it, but the way wasn't simple for the former World Champion.

Everything ended in the rook endgame, which reminded me of the game ... Magnus Calrsen-Levon Aronian (Sinquefield Cup 2014). In that game, the Armenian player saved the endgame without three pawns using the famous Vancura idea. Yesterday, it was Magnus's turn to show how well he learned the lessons from the ten-year-old game.

Rafael Leitao (https://www.chess.com/news/view/2024-freestyle-chess-match-carlsen-wins) and Hikaru Nakamura had already analyzed the key moments from the yesterday's game, and I don't want to repeat all they said. Here, I want to show you how similar these two games were.

Here is the game of 2014.

Here is the second game.

Now, we see almost the same position as in 2014. The second pawn on the h-file doesn't influence neither on the evaluation nor on the scenario of the game. Next 28 moves didn't change anything.

Study the rook endgames to always be on the side that uses the opponent's mistakes instead of making their own! 

By the way, I recently issued a course about rook endgames on Chessable, in which I explained (amongst other topics) how the Vancura idea works even in more complicated cases