A fairly common defensive tactic is to reach one of these drawn endgames, often through a sacrifice.
A less common situation is the defense of bishop versus rook and rook pawn; the wrong rook pawn is the one that promotes on the square not controlled by the bishop, because the defending king and bishop can form a blockade in the corner (on the pawn's promotion square) and draw the game.
In this type of endgame, the wrong rook pawn is the one whose queening square is the opposite color as that on which the bishop resides.
Many such positions are drawn because of a fortress if the defending king can get to the corner in front of the pawn.
With the bishop not able to control the a8-square, the black king cannot be forced away from the corner, so the pawn will not be able to promote.
[5] In this position from a 1929 game between Viktor Arsentievich Goglidze and Genrikh Kasparian, Black uses the tactic of offering the sacrifice of his bishop for the pawn on the e-file to leave White with the wrong rook pawn: and the game was drawn twelve moves later.
One way is: Now White must dislodge or capture the knight in order to allow the pawn to safely advance, but doing so allows the black king into the corner: In the actual game,[7] Black mistakenly moved his king further from the corner (81...Ke4??)
and lost because a knight has a hard time defending against rook pawns.
(Fischer went on to win the match 6–0 and advance to the next round, and subsequently became World Champion.)
Ten-year-old Garry Kasparov[a] thought that he was winning this game as Black against Edvīns Ķeņģis, being two pawns ahead.
[11] Garry Kasparov used sacrifices to leave Anatoly Karpov with the wrong rook pawn to save the twentieth game of their 1985 World Championship, after a long endgame.
Some commentators thought that Korchnoi might have missed a win in this endgame, but Karpov defended well and White never had a theoretically won position.
If the defending bishop is sacrificed for the other pawn, the resulting position is a draw like the ones above.
[20] In this game between FIDE Master Edgar Walther and Bobby Fischer,[21] White has just made a bad move (54.a4?
In this position from a game between future World Champion Max Euwe and Karel Hromádka, Black should win but he errs by advancing his pawn too soon.
Similar positions were studied by Josef Kling and Bernhard Horwitz in 1851 and by Johann Berger in 1921.