I suspect the author only counts raw material. So players who lose a pawn but gain compensation reduce the perceived impact of losing a pawn. Including many openings where you temporarily give up a pawn (queen's gambit, benko, etc).

I was thinking the same. It could be true for higher ELO players being down a pawn is a good thing, since your opponent took the bait.

Many pawn-up endgames are still technically a draw (king and pawn vs. king [1] in the most extreme example)

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_and_pawn_versus_king_endg...

Take care that not all of king and pawn versus king are drawn. Their result depends on relative position of kings.

Nice example of more extreme imbalance is that sometimes King+Queen vs King+Pawn is drawn - that is when pawn is on seventh rank of bishop or rook file with defending king in front of it, while attacking king is not close enough to force checkmate.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_versus_pawn_endgame#Quee...

Yeah. More commonly rook endings are notoriously hard to win.

I gained a lot of rating once I started really studying the ins and outs of all the different rook and pawn vs rook endings. Because no matter what the tablebase might say, you have to be very precise with or without the pawn.

So I started getting a lot of wins out of equal positions, and got a lot better at saving a draw in bad positions.

Pawn and minor piece vs minor piece is also fraught with drawing chances, especially with bishops. Because you can just sac the piece for the pawn and there's insufficient material for mate.

Queen and pawn vs queen is basically a 3 result game at the club level. So many ways to blunder your queen. And at GM level it tends towards a draw I think. Though it's so stupidly complicated I never even tried to properly study it.

> Yeah. More commonly rook endings are notoriously hard to win.

Oh, so it's not just me.

There's a famous saying in chess: "all rook endings are drawn".

Of course, this isn't actually true. But it's a useful rule of thumb to just assume it's a draw unless you're sure it's a win, because it probably is, fucking somehow.

That depends both on the position of the pawn and the king...

Just a friendly pedantic point, it's "Elo", not "ELO". Rather than an acronym, it's a person's name; that being the rating system creator, Arpad Elo.

For years the guy calculated the FIDE ratings by hand...

If you want to be fully pedantic, it's Élő, not Elo - the way in which you pronounce the former is dramatically different from the latter.

if you want to be fully fully pedantic its Glicko-2 rating system on Lichess, while FIDE uses Élő.

Rather, players have a FIDE rating within FIDE, and a unique rating in each system, because no organization follows the exact, original Elo system.

To be correctly pedantic, it's named after Élő but it is called the Elo rating system

You are correct, but this uses Lichess ratings, which are a bit inflated, and probably a variety of time controls including blitz. At levels of play below super-grandmaster with full time control the accuracy of play can be rather low, and picking a suboptimal move will often cost you half a pawn (or more) in engine evaluation. Add this up over an entire game and a one pawn advantage is easily lost in the variability of both players making compounding errors.