how to play chess endgames book

Foreword by John Nunn
In these days of computer-assisted preparation, opening work has become a fairly mechanical process.
You sit down with a database and a strong engine, and you just work your way through your
repertoire one line at a time. The main limitations are the time you have available and your memory
capacity. Additionally, there is a huge literature available on the openings, which enables players of
all standards to rapidly acquire a good knowledge of virtually any line. In open tournaments, it is
not unusual to see masters and grandmasters discomfited by much lower rated opponents who have
sprung a piece of opening preparation on their unsuspecting opponents.
Mastery of the endgame is another matter entirely. To be sure, there is some memory work involved
and a knowledge of basic positions is an essential prerequisite for endgame proficiency, but
the amount of information which needs to be memorized is much smaller than that involved in
opening preparation. A far more important factor is to have a 'feel' for the endgame. It has been
truly said that the endgame is the part of chess which most clearly distinguishes the master from the
amateur, but why should this be? Certainly natural skill plays a part, and the great endgame players
of the past, such as Rubinstein, Capablanca and Smyslov, clearly had an exceptional talent for this
part of the game.
A second factor is that many players devote relatively little attention to the endgame. They long
for a quick kill and spend hour after hour studying openings, ignoring the endgame more or less
completely. Memorizing a few innovations in the opening may seem more exciting than learning
how to win a rook ending with an extra pawn, but the latter will earn more points in the long run.
Finally, we come to the important point that endgame literature is very sparse compared to that
devoted to opening theory. If you have the talent ofCapablanca, you probably don't need a book to
tell you how to play endings, but for the rest of us some guidance is a great assistance and can help
avoid many painful lessons over the board. Just as some opening books offer a detailed coverage of
an opening, while others focus more on plans and ideas, so the same distinction can be made with
endgame books. The majority of endgame books adopt an encyclopaedic approach, offering a
comprehensive coverage of some part of endgame theory or, if the authors are ambitious, the whole
of endgame theory. Fundamental Chess Endings by Karsten Millier and Frank Lamprecht (Gambit,
200 I) is a good example of this genre. I must admit to liking this type of book, and I have
written three myself in the encyclopaedic style. However, the second type of endgame book is
just as important; the type that explains how to play the endings, and tries to help develop that
all-important but elusive 'feel' for the endgame.
This book fills a gap in endgame literature by offering a systematic point-by-point overview of
the general methods of endgame play. There are a lot of misconceptions about endgame play. Perhaps
fuelled by stories of how players such as Capablanca just 'knew' where to put their pieces,
there is a general feeling that endgame play is mainly about intuition and that calculation plays a
relatively small part. This is far from the truth. Capablanca clearly had a good feel for the best
squares for his pieces, but you can bet that he did plenty of calculation as well. Tactics play as important
a role in the endgame as in the rest of the game. Mating attacks may be less common in the
endgame than in the middlegarne, but in the endgame there are tactical ideas which rarely occur in
other phases of the game, such as promotion combinations and zugzwang. Thus endgame play is a
mixture of strategy and tactics, with some similarities to the rest of the game but also possessing
distinctive features. Getting the tactics right is often a critical matter, as while a middlegame position