At move 45 looks easy draw. Or should be draw in most cases. White king wants shelter if he can possibly the h file. The rook needs space so a8 is good and then block the king from moving forward. I noticed a few occasions when you could have pushed your king up on square and instead used your rook. By moving your king up one square you force blacks rook to come back and give you a check. Played pretty well though. The rook on the e file is ok in my opinion but prefer it on the more open a file and then like you did the back and forth with the rooks forcing opponent to do something which he cannot do. Don't exchange rooks, Don't let the king go forward, Rook stays active, Keep king up the board and covered if possible.
Rook and Pawn Ending Gone Bad
Sort:
At least after 48. ... g6 the draw looks pretty straighforward; 49. Ra5! with the threat 50. h5! Black playing ... h5 is awful. Alternatives:
(a) 49 ... Kf6 50. Ra6+ Kg7 51. Ra5 Rf7 52. Kf4 and black can do nothing.
(b) 49. ... Rc3+ 50. Kf4 Rf4+ 51. Kf3 and h5! is still on the card.
I posted this a few days ago in the game analysis forum but had no bites. Maybe endgame specialists are more likely to look here?
I'm kicking myself over this game -- not because of my sloppy play over the first twenty-five moves, but because after I managed to claw my way back and get to what looked like a drawn rook-and-pawn endgamge, I blew it. (As luck would have it, my opponent couldn't figure out how to finish the job and I escaped with a draw I didn't deserve.)
In endgames, I find the engine helpful only up to a point. It can say that this or that move is good or bad but can't show what a general strategy should look like. So I'm calling on flesh-and-blood players for guidance on whether I had anything like the right idea about how to play moves 45 through 78? Was it just a single screwup on move 79, or would there have been safer, easier ways to play the position that would have reduced my chances of giving Black a winning line?
Some notes from me herein, I'm White, and this is a correspondence game.
P. S. The fact that chess.com's analysis page informs me that I played this game with 99.0% accuracy tells me all I need to know about the maningfulness of that silly metric . . .