White king on the 6th rank in a king and pawn endgame, typically in distant opposition with the black king on the 8th rank.

By Climbchess Research · 2026-05-08 · 3 min read · Updated May 8, 2026

SAE concept sae_5663 fires when white king on the 6th rank in a king and pawn endgame, typically in distant opposition with the black king on the 8th rank.. It appears in 16 of 9,950 Climbchess puzzles (0.2%), spanning ELO 1613–2616 (median 1945).

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This page documents White king on the 6th rank in a king and pawn…, one of 4,505 interpretable chess concepts extracted from Leela Chess Zero via sparse autoencoders. The full feature description from our SAE labelling pipeline reads:

White king on the 6th rank in a king and pawn endgame, typically in distant opposition with the black king on the 8th rank.

This pattern fires in 16 of our 9,950 tagged puzzles. The puzzles where it appears span ELO 1613 to 2616, with a median rating of 1945. That distribution tells you whether this is a beginner cue or a master-level subtlety.

Pattern statistics

Related concepts

The five concepts most often co-firing alongside this one (Jaccard similarity over the puzzle co-occurrence graph) are:

• Advanced or passed pawn in a bishop or pawn endgame, often a connected or… — similarity 0.111
• An isolated or passed pawn on the 4th rank in a pawn endgame, often the pivot… — similarity 0.100
• King-and-pawn endgame decided by zugzwang, with no pieces other than kings and… — similarity 0.100
• Detects contested squares where white holds equal or superior control… — similarity 0.053
• White rook actively placed on an open file or rank, often near the opponent's… — similarity 0.050

Example puzzles

Below are 10 puzzles spanning the rating distribution. Each links to its own page with full move list and related concepts.

• Puzzle 01pJ3 — ELO 1613, themes: crushing, endgame, knightEndgame, side to move: White
• Puzzle 01pJ3_F — ELO 1613, themes: crushing, endgame, knightEndgame, side to move: Black
• Puzzle znLDK — ELO 1838, themes: crushing, endgame, exposedKing, side to move: Black
• Puzzle znLDK_F — ELO 1838, themes: crushing, endgame, exposedKing, side to move: White
• Puzzle ztFuF — ELO 1945, themes: advancedPawn, crushing, defensiveMove, side to move: White
• Puzzle ztFuF_M — ELO 1945, themes: advancedPawn, crushing, defensiveMove, side to move: White
• Puzzle zzMhe — ELO 2142, themes: advancedPawn, bishopEndgame, crushing, side to move: Black
• Puzzle zzMhe_M — ELO 2142, themes: advancedPawn, bishopEndgame, crushing, side to move: Black
• Puzzle znieJ — ELO 2277, themes: crushing, endgame, exposedKing, side to move: White
• Puzzle 01AyE — ELO 2616, themes: crushing, endgame, pawnEndgame, side to move: Black

How to use this page

If you want to train this pattern, open the Climbchess trainer and filter for puzzles tagged with this concept. The trainer surfaces them at the right difficulty for your current rating, and tracks how often you spot the cue versus miss it. You can also browse the related concepts above to see neighbouring ideas in feature space.

Climbchess concepts are not heuristics written by a human author. Each one corresponds to a single direction in the residual stream of Leela Chess Zero that activates on a specific board feature, then was labelled by reading the top-activating positions. This makes the catalogue exhaustive (every Leela-detectable pattern is in here somewhere) and falsifiable (you can replay our extraction).