Customer Reviews

Chess Endings Made Simple : How to Approach the Endgame with Confidence

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How often do you find phrases like "made simple" in the title of a book, only to find yourself out of your depth after a few pages? Well, you can rest assured. this book really does stick to the simple things. It tackles the end game in terms of concepts and plans, concentrating on basic principles, which can be applied in a practical way to our own endgame.

After an opening chapter on pawnless endings, we have a chapter on King and Pawn endings, a long section on Rook and Pawn endings, the most common type of ending encountered in practical play, followed by chapters on Knight endings, Bishop endings, Bishop and Knight endings, and Queen endings.

The second part of the book consists of 100 exercises, all taken from practical play, to test to what extent the reader can apply the knowledge gained in the first part. What is surprising is the number of times really simple endings occur in practical play. The 100 positions include a great many taken from GM games. I was pleasantly surprised at how often, after only a few seconds thought, I was able to find the winning/drawing line simply by applying my newly acquired knowledge. But even more astounding was the number of times a GM or very strong player had failed to find the right method. Food for thought here!

There have been many books on the ending written over the years, including a good number in the present millennium, but in terms of value for money I reckon that this one takes some beating. It is yet another example of my oft repeated dictum that GMs are not the best people to write for less able players.

This review first appeared in the magazine En Passant.

How good is it when the author takes time to write conceptually what's going on, place a diagram with arrows, circles and whatever aids are needed to clarify his point and then explain clearly what is it that he wants to do with the position? And how great is it when after five moves the author shows you what happened afterwards with another diagram and repeats the process of analyzing the position and showing you how to play it? I used to think that Concise Chess Endgames was the best way to start to study the endgame but I was wrong... This is the book! This is the book to start studying endgames! I consider that the author must be a superb teacher because he uses all resources available to him to teach. Why can't books on such an arid topic as the endgame be as illustrative as this one?

The bok is very good and can lead to more complex books almost immediately. One important point: the bishop and knight mate is presented primarely to learn coordination between bishop and knight during middlegame. That is not me saying, but several strong players and two coaches I met.

So, practice it. I did and can now coordinate those pieces with a considerable succes.

I had high hopes for this book but I was a little disappointed, perhaps because I had such high hopes. The idea and format of this book is imaginative and very appealing. If the author had pulled it off it could have been a classic, but IMO he failed in the execution. It's still a pretty nice book though.

I would say the book is intended for beginners up to say 1600 with respect to its style, although the content is broad (Lucena, Philidor, Vancura) if sparse. I still don't get why anyone teaches B+N mate though (yes I can) - it just seems indulgent. But most of the material is well chosen. There is also a large collection of 100 exercises which is very welcome.

There is much useful material of an instructive nature in the book - not just information for memorization - so it's still quite a useful book. What's the problem then? Too often the author works through a position and then summarizes the technique after the fact. Now these are nice, consumable, practical tips, but the learning experience would have been so much better if the tips were introduced in the immediate analysis, and then summarized later. In other words, the tips are offered as new revelations after the example rather than as a summary of what you have already learnt in context. Of course, you can appreciate them immediately because the example offered the context, but the summaries don't really reinforce anything. I found that I needed to immediately play over most of the positions again in order to reinforce what I had learned at the end (maybe he is an evil genius).

Of course, I have a terrible memory and I'm a slow learner so other readers might not object to the author's approach. If it seems like you're the kind of learner that I am you might find this a little frustrating though. On the other hand, there is precious little non-expert material that combines basic positions with skill instruction available, so the book still has a lot to offer.