Quick answer
Quick answer: Park your rook on your third rank and leave it there. Your king stays in front of the pawn. The moment their pawn steps onto that third rank, drop your rook to the back and check their king from behind.
That's the entire defence and it holds a draw a pawn down.
I read the standard treatment and the technique is shorter than people assume. Two rules, one switch, and it works. Most players lose these endings without ever knowing it existed.
Why this matters more than the Lucena
Everybody learns the winning technique first and then never needs it.
You'll be defending a rook ending far more often than converting one, because being a pawn down happens more often than being a pawn up and the defending side can always try.
So the drawing method is the one that saves you rating points.
And unlike the winning method, this one needs no calculation at all. It's a setup you reach and then hold.
The setup in plain terms
Three things, and they all have to be true.
Your king stands on the square the pawn wants to promote on, or next to it.
Your rook sits on your own third rank, running across the board, so their king cannot step onto that rank.
And their pawn has not yet reached that rank. If it has, you're too late for this method.
Count the third rank from your own back rank, not from theirs. Defending as Black against a white pawn, that means the sixth rank on the board.
Why the third rank
It's a wall.
The attacking king needs to get in front of its own pawn to make progress. Your rook on the third rank stops it crossing, because any square it would use is attacked.
So the attacker is stuck. The pawn can't advance safely without the king, and the king can't advance past the rook.
That stalemate of plans is why the position is drawn rather than merely hard to win.
What you do while you wait
Nothing. That's the hard part.
I counted the useful moves in this position and there are none. Slide the rook along the third rank, back and forth, and do not leave it. Move your king only when you must, and only between squares that keep it in front of the pawn.
Players lose this by getting bored and trying to do something active.
There is nothing to do. The position is already drawn and any plan you invent makes it worse.
The moment the pawn advances
Eventually the attacker plays the pawn to your third rank, because it's the only try they have.
Now your rook has to leave, since it can't stay on a rank the pawn occupies.
This is the switch. The rook drops to the far end of the board, the rank the attacking king started on, as far from the action as it can get.
From there it checks their king from behind, and those checks never stop.
Don't rush it. You only make this switch when the pawn actually steps onto the rank, not when you think it's about to.
Why checking from behind works
The pawn has moved forward, which means it no longer shelters its own king from the back.
Your rook now checks along a file or a rank with nothing between it and the enemy king.
To escape, their king would have to walk towards your rook and away from its own pawn. The moment it does that, the pawn falls.
So they choose between endless checks and losing the pawn, and neither wins.
Distance is what makes the checks safe
The rook has to be far away. The far end of the board, not one rank behind the pawn.
From close range their king can walk at your rook and attack it, and you run out of checking squares.
From the far end there's nothing they can do. The distance is the defence.
This is the same idea as checking distance in queen endings, and it's the detail that separates a held draw from a lost one.
Where the defence fails
One case, and it's worth knowing.
If the attacker gets their own rook onto those far ranks first, they take away the squares you need to check from.
The answer is to offer a rook trade the moment you see it coming. A king and pawn ending a pawn down, with your king in front, is usually drawn anyway.
So a failure of this method often turns into a draw by a different route. The full rook and pawn treatment sets out the cases.
The other common mistake
Putting the rook on the wrong rank.
Second rank is too close and gives the attacking king a square. Fourth rank leaves a rank free in front of it for their king to occupy.
Third rank, every time, counted from your own side of the board.
It feels arbitrary until you set it up and try the alternatives, at which point it becomes obvious in about four moves.
Getting into the position at all
This is the real skill, and it happens twenty moves earlier.
When you're a pawn down in a rook ending, your job is to get your king in front of the pawn and your rook onto the third rank, in that order.
Everything else is secondary. Not your extra pawn on the other wing, not a tempting check.
King in front. Rook on the third. If you achieve both, you draw.
If you can only have one of the two, take the king. A king in front of the pawn saves more of these endings than a well placed rook does.
When your king cannot get in front
Then this method isn't available, and you're usually worse.
The fallback is to check from behind anyway, from as far away as you can, and hope their king can't shelter.
A rook cut off on the wrong side of the pawn is the losing pattern, and it's what the winning side is aiming for.
Which is why you fight for king position early rather than hanging on to material.
Active rook, passive rook
One more rule that decides more rook endings than any specific position.
A rook defending a pawn from directly in front of it is passive and usually loses. A rook attacking from behind or from the side keeps drawing chances alive.
That's true whether you're the attacker or the defender.
We went through the general principles in winning and drawing rook endings.
Giving up a second pawn to free your rook is often the right trade in a rook ending, which feels wrong and wins games.
Drilling it
Set the position up and hold the draw against an engine, ten times.
The first two you'll be following the rules. By the tenth you'll feel where the rook wants to go, which is the whole point.
Then do it a week later without revising, because that's the test that tells you whether it stuck.
A bot on our play page is enough for this, and it takes about fifteen minutes.
Where it sits in a study plan
First, ahead of almost everything else in the endgame.
Rook endings are the most common ending in real games, and the defending side reaches this shape constantly without recognising it.
People spend months on opening lines and lose these instead.
Our endgame study order puts the Philidor and the Lucena at the front for exactly that reason.
The named position and the man
Philidor was an eighteenth century French player and composer, and he wrote about pawn play long before anybody else took it seriously.
The position that carries his name is one of several, which is why searches for it sometimes turn up a queen ending instead.
None of that matters at the board.
What matters is the third rank, the wait, and the switch to checking from behind.