Last Saturday I played in a 4 round G/90 club tournament.  It featured some pretty stiff competition considering the small turnout:  two masters (2200 USCF) and an expert (2000) out of only 16 registrants.  I ended up with a 2.5/4 score, which I suppose is disappointing considering that my average opponent was over 400 points below me.

This position is from my third round, after Black's 54th move.  At this point I had ~15 minutes left, and my opponent ~25 (with 5 second delay).  Because of the rating difference between us, I was under pressure not to take a draw, and I had declined two previous offers in very equal positions.  Several moves ago, I had finally wedged him from his g5 pawn and I thought that this game was finally in the bag.  But 40 moves and 40 minutes later, I was unable to find a win, even after literally walking my king around the entire board (it visited the lands of e3, b5, and e8 before finally coming back to g5).  I could barely believe that it wasn't an easy win.  I simply couldn't find a way to wedge him off of the pawn.  Even such tries as Ke8 and a check on the sixth rank didn't work.  Besides a simple missed tactic when I had 22 seconds left, the two masters watching were also unable to find a win.

This position has a few simple rules to it:

1.  The pure pawn endgame is a win, so my opponent can't trade rooks.  Thus I can challenge his rook for important lines, e.g. to get my king past a cutoff line.

2.  I can't trade my f-pawn for his e-pawn.  This would result in Philidor's position (Wikipedia page), a simple draw.  The only exception would be if I manage to get his king cut off from my e-pawn, but I don't think this can be forced.

Fritz 8 (yes, it is old and weak by modern standards, but it could still crush GMs any day) hasn't been too helpful either.  It doesn't have any understanding of the drawishness of Philidor's, and so all of its top move suggestions involve trading the pawns.

I guess I should have taken the draw the first time.  Then we both would have had two whole hours for dinner, a post-mortem, and/or bughouse.  Instead I chose to fight on for the entire time control and all I got was this lousy blog post