- ISBN13: 9781857445565
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
How can you improve your chess? It’s not by chance that the top players say: ‘Study the endgame!’ This is because a great number of encounters reach the endgame, and studying these positions will teach you how to convert winning positions, and how to save or even overturn inferior ones. Moreover, it’s a well-known fact that studying endgames undoubtedly enhances other aspects of your play.
Practical Endgame Play – Mastering the Basics is a comprehensive guide to all fundamental chess endings, and a godsend for those looking to improve their endgame play. Crucially, the emphasis is just as much on practical play as it is on theoretical understanding. Whenever an idea is introduced, Grandmaster Efstratios Grivas immediately illustrates it with a number of entertaining and instructive examples, a considerable number of which are drawn from his own over-the-board experiences.
This is a companion volume to Everyman’s earlier book Practical Endgame Play – Beyond the Basics, a work which specializes in more complex positions.
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This book is a very thorough introduction to endgame play with many recent grandmaster examples. Since since many endgames in this book have been analyzed elsewhere the analysis does not deviate from standard conclusions reached in many sources. However, many books on the endgame these days offer more strategic ideas (for instance Lars Bo Hansen, Secrets of Chess Endgame Strategy) or more conclusive hand analysis (for instance Beliavsky’s books). My main complaints are: (1) lots of unchecked analysis and (2) not enough practical guidance, for instance many endgames are only interesting in terms of transition to the endgame or the first few moves which determine the character of the position.
Amazon User Rating: 3 / 5
I love the endgame and I read more endgame books than I should. This is a really great, wide selection of foundational material (“basic” is a bit of an oversell) with decent, but not exceptional, instructional notes. It is consumable by mortals but it’s not going to hold your hand. It is well organized and would do just fine as a reference book too.
This would be a fine only or first (real) endgame book for someone with the drive to do the hard work that it involves. The positions, while not all basic, are not particularly difficult and should be accessible to most intermediates and there are a bunch of them. Get through this and you certainly have a sound, practical foundation – especially in rook endings. It is intended for someone with ambition or a love of the endgame. While all the material is practical, the book makes no attempt to give you a “minimum possible set” of basic positions like, say, Silman’s book so it takes more discipline and desire to make the most of it. I had to play many of the positions out on an analysis board so I would say it might not be suitable for studying away from the board.
I love this book. It doesn’t have the depth of Emms’ Survival Guide to Rook Endings, or the spoon feeding of Silman’s Complete Endgame Course, but it has a very good practical selection of material and would make an ideal course for self-study. Buy it with confidence when you’re ready to get serious.
Update: The only qualification I would add though, is that if you’re sufficiently dedicated to work through this one you’re probably sufficiently dedicated to work through Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual. I haven’t done that yet, but everyone seems to agree that it is the gold standard.
Amazon User Rating: 5 / 5