The position shown on the right with white (me) to move is from one of my recent games at ChessWorld. White has the material advantage and a promising passed pawn on the g-file. The game started balanced until black made a tactical mistake on the 35th move and I was able to keep the advantage for 20 moves until I finally managed to come up with a series of really bad moves. It started with 55. g6 - passed pawns have to be pushed, right? As usual, rules do have exceptions. There is only one sensible move for white in the shown position. What is the correct move? (Hint: it is not 55. g6 ;-)

Lately, I have been playing mostly against players whose ratings are above mine (in this case, the difference is about 150 points). Therefore, I am loosing most of my games but I hope to improve faster by playing against stronger opponents. In the few games where I manage to obtain an advantage, I tend to make devastating mistakes in the endgame. It seems that there is some mental barrier making me look for "killer moves" instead of ensuring that all my pieces are safe (see also the interesting article "When You're Winning, It's a Whole Different Game" [pdf format] by Dan Heisman at chesscafe.com). Even after 55. g6, however, the game was not lost. Take a look at the full game with annotations for more hints on making bad moves in the endgame.

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