The Knight Blockade vs Bishop and Pawn
Black to play and draw
PlayA bishop, a pawn and a king against your lone knight, and nothing on the board can move you. The blockade square is dark, the bishop lives on light, and that mismatch is the entire endgame.
No signup needed. The opponent never gives up, and every mistake gets explained.
The Knight Blockade vs Bishop and Pawn
Hold the draw against perfect play
Waking the engine…
The theory
Bishop against knight arguments are settled square by square, and no square matters more than the one directly in front of a passed pawn. When that square is the opposite color of the escorting bishop, a lone knight can blockade forever, a piece down in support and completely safe.
The wrong-color blockade. A knight parked on the stop square can only be evicted by force, and the bishop is constitutionally incapable of applying any: it will never attack a dark square in its life. The logic is the wrong-bishop corner all over again, promoted from a corner to the middle of the board. Whatever maneuvers White finds, the attacking force against d6 is one king, exactly what the knight is built to handle.
The covering circuit. When the king does attack the post, the knight does not cling: it steps to one of the squares that still guard d6 from a distance (b7, c8, e8, f7) and returns the moment the threat passes. A knight guards its own post from four remote addresses, which is one more than any king can cover at once. This is the same check-and-return loop as the basic knight blockade, with the bishop reduced to a spectator.
The evaluation habit: before trading into bishop versus knight with a passed pawn on the board, look at the color of the square in front of the pawn. Same color as the bishop, the knight will be evicted and the pawn runs; opposite color, the defender has this fortress. One glance, and it decides which minor piece you keep in a hundred middlegames.