Grandmaster Preparation: Endgame Play

Long ago when I was a junior, Fine's Basic Chess Endings was about all that was available on the endings. BCE is a generally difficult book to read & out of date. Later I acquired Keres' Practical Chess Endings, readable, and usable, but I didn't develop much endgame skill until years later. In 1999, when I became determined to address my losing record to my club rival. A 2100 Serbian player who would only play 5-minute chess. His strategy was: always play the same opening, swap down to the endgame, play every move within a few seconds and score a win either in the endgame or on the clock. To counter this, I picked up Chernev's book of Capablanca's Endings. Read it from cover to cover (incidentally how many of us have actually read through an entire chess book). I raised my ability and we became pretty much equal in results. Of course modern GM & IM chess no longer has adjournments, so they too have had to improve their endings. The result has been real growth of endgame understanding and a recent flood of excellent endgame books. If you have any manual by Mueller, Dvoretsky, Nunn's series or de la Villas you are covered for basic endings (though I find these texts are tough slog to read, but great for reference). However, to play well in the endgame takes something more. Chernev's book is still a good choice for 1500-1900s to develop their skills for practical play (in spite of it's being dated with a few errors of no great significance). Since 2001, the entrance of the PC revolution has impacted the study of practical endgame play. Databases, quick-sorting of like-positions, and the quality of publishing layouts with big, clear diagrams has allowed a major improvement in this area of chess publishing. Two great examples are Muellers incredible book on pawn ending and Flears gigantic study of double piece endings. Nowadays all GMs are being tested to prove their endgame competence. With Carlsen setingt a high standard for calculation, speed of play and has infused fresh imaginative ideas into practical play. Aagaards starting premise with this book is "endgames will at some point become entirely concrete, just as middlegames usually do... they oscillate between manoeuering and tactical confrontation". In twelve chapters, he presents 442 positions to study, solve, and understand. Each chapter starts with theoretical details (some intros are extensive and others are fairly short.). Study positions mostly come from play between 2006 to 2013, with a few earlier examples. The solutions present the moves, with detailed analysis and well-worded explanations of what Aagaard believes we should learn from that particular diagram. Brilliant stuff! Tons and tons of information. The chapters cover pawn endings, opposite B's, Rook endings, fortresses, complex endings. Production quality is superb, with six diagrams to a page followed overleaf by solutions and learning. Unlike Mueller who is very terse and almost humorless, or Dvoretsky who drifts a bit and often struggles with focus and Chernev who is sychophantic about Capa; I find Aagaard is exactly on point. His breezey prose style treats the reader as an equal while conveying large chunks of understanding and constantly testing us to open our chess-minds. The book opens out flat on my table; the binding seems likely to handle a long life of many readings; and can also be studied in a chair or in bed. Diagrams are easy on the eye. Notes are well-laid out. The double column layout means there is a huge amount of material. Aagaard reports Mueller has actually twice checked the book for errors. I believe the $20ish price, is a good value for a few hundred hours of study from this book (making it a good return). Aagaard reccomends using this as a self-study workbook where you follow a self-drilling approach. The reader is intended to go back again and again to expand/review knowledge and practice analytic ability.

Once again Jacob Aagaard has shown us that he is the best chess writer of our time. This book is jammed pack full of challenging positions that will train your ability to calculate variations and to make decisions at the chess board. Most of the positions in the book come from recently played games from top class events. Here you will find many positions by players rated 2500-2750 and you will be suprised how frequently they misplay these positions. My current rating is 2092 and I found that the positions were very challenging for me, but I was able to solve a large number of the ones I sampled. I would recommend that you have a database updated through 2013 and that you use this to read this book. You will be able to find most of the problems in the data base (chessbases' Mega base 2014 works very well). This will make reading the notes much easier and you can store your own observations in your the base. There are approximately 300 positions in here, so if you work on it an hour a day, plan to spend about three months reading it. I am sure that at the end, you will not only learn a lot about endgames, but your at the board decision making and calculation will improve dramatically.

This is the best book on endgames I have ever seen. Why? 1. It contains only real endgames that really happened. The composed studies are not so practical as there is usually only one, narrow path to victory and this is not very helpful to improve the real play 2. The concepts are illustrated by well-chosen examples 3. The majority of the book are exercises. As the author puts it "you can do it only if you can do it". I have spent hundreds of hours watching videos and tutorials, but only after trying to solve problems myself I can remember it later. So this approach is great. I definitely recommend this book.

I got this book in time. I everything seems good, but I had water damage on some page. Overall is workable.

I have his whole series of books. Although a bit over my head I find them all great. No others compare

It has helped me to improve my endgame

Excellent service and quality book

Challenging endgame positions to analyze with a short description of how GMs misplayed the position and what correct play would be. In CH1 and 2 I got app. 80% correct. Chapter 3 ''Simple Rook Endgames'' gets a lot harder. I started it at 10% correct but after suffering thru the chapter I was at 30%. My conclusion is that these positions are not easy, take time to understand and are worth the time and effort. By the way, I am finding ones where I think there may be an error or an alternate solution. I only checked one, #15 in Ch5, on a computer today and the solution was incorrect. (The suggested move was right but there was an error in the followup.) I still think it's improving my endgame play suffering thru the positions.

Com a experiência que eu adquiri ao longo da minha carreira como professor e instrutor de xadrez e amante em livros, este aborda finais práticas, diretamente retiradas de partidas reais, o autor não explica conceitos básicos mas as partidas são de fácil compreensão quanto às ideias detalhadas. Em suma, o autor explica muito bem. Livro recomendado para jogadores que já conhecem os conceitos fundamentais de finais. Recomendo.

A good book to sharpen your endgame practical play with some concepts here and there in the usual Aaggaard's high quality standard.

Le gain d'une partie d'échecs n'est possible que si l'on a acquis de bonnes bases dans le secteur de jeu que sont les finales. A mon sens, cette partie du jeu, bien qu'assez complexe, est la plus passionnante car elle peut déboucher sur des retournements de situations extraordinaires. Dans son ouvrage, le Grand Maître aux "4 a" : Jacob Aagaard, aborde tous les types de finales que nous devons maîtriser. Les éditions Quality Chess et la préface de Karsten Muller confèrent à ce livre un sérieux supplémentaire. A se procurer.

Besty