Chessable Winning Endgame Tactics 3 Rook And ... ((NEW))

The books are arranged in the order I will read them. The first four are elementary tactics where the puzzles are sorted by theme (pin, fork, skewer, etc). They are also arranged in order of difficulty, which I have inferred by the average line depth (number of moves) listed on chessable. The second two books (The Tactics Time books) are mixed tactical motifs and the final four books are checkmate books.

Chessable Winning Endgame Tactics 3 Rook And ...

Before reading the book I would be pretty planless in endgames and often throw a winning position. Just having knowledge of what must seem to a lot of people like obvious stuff has helped me a lot. For example - do I have a passed pawn in the endgame? Great. Stick a rook behind that and launch it up the board.

One of the most major things I have noticed (and again this is almost embarrassing to write), is when I have a 4v3 majority on one side of the board I actually know how to create a passed pawn. Pretty useful stuff. Just knowing the point of the endgame is to promote a pawn 90% of the time is ridiculously obvious but not something I was doing before! I seemed to be chucking my pieces across the board trying to attack pawns and set up tactics.

At a beginner stage, if you're capable of delivering the basic mates, plus know the basics of king+pawn-vs-king and rook+pawn-vs-rook, that's probably more theoretical endgames than you'll need for a long time.

On the other hand, there's practical endgames (say, a bishop+5pawns vs knight+4pawns type of position). These often boil down to tactics and strategy. Depending on your actual level, the time control you play at, the openings you choose and many other factors, you will encounter yourself in this type of situation more or less often. These positions are a great bootcamp for some fundamental strategical concepts (like bad bishops, the seventh rank, weak pawns and so on).

But I still think tactics will be a more important skill in the sense that they come before everything else. In practice, it won't matter how good you are with your "technique" to win an equal-ish knight endgame if you end up missing a fork. Good tactics (and precise calculation) are a tool that allows you to achieve your strategical objectives in a chess game efficiently.

For advanced beginners (rules, elementary mates, minimum opening priciples known), I train tactics, endgame and minigames intermixed. Again tactics will have the highest short time boost. But endgames will train a certain "feeling" for the handling of a single piece. (Without a certain amount of chess intuition, you never get really good, and it must be trained early.) I will not specifically train, say, rook bridge or Philidor defense. This will come after training them to survive the middle game, and too many games are decided by lack of specific endgame knowledge.

For Endgame I would also recommend to consider endgame specific tactics (like this in lichess) and Books I would suggest to start with "100 Endgames You Must Know" by Jesús de la Villa and then the legendary one - Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual (There is also a very good chessable course on this book by GM Erwin L'Ami)

Understand please, I'm not saying study endgames exclusively until you can play all of them as well as Yuri Averbakh. I'm saying study endgames until you can reliably bring home the point you earn in the Middlegame (or, just as importantly, prevent your opponent from bringing home the point they earned). Eventually you will start using the tactics you've learned in your endgame study to gain advantage (or win) in your middlegames. 041b061a72