Set up the position and take the White pieces against an engine like ExChess or against a human training partner. Here’s a sample, taken from Chapter 7 (“Complex Minor Piece Endings”). Endgame Play contains 430 positions ideally suited to this task. Dvoretsky is sufficient for the first part, but we must sit down and solve positions or, better, play them out with training partners if we are to gain practical experience. His practical strength was not equal to his theoretical knowledge, and so he lost a game that was completely drawn.Īagaard’s prescription in Endgame Play is simple: the ambitious player must know the theoretical positions and she must be practiced in playing typical positions out. The junior, playing Black, had seen some of the key defensive ideas in a previous training session, but either ‘forgot’ what to do or simply crumbled under time pressure. On the board next to me on Monday night, a very promising junior lost a rook endgame where White had a 3-2 pawn advantage, but all pawns were on the kingside, no pawns were isolated or doubled, etc. Let me give you an example from recent club play. If you can’t prove it OTB, it does you no good. It’s not just enough to ‘know’ the theory. Of course you can just set up the positions on your board / screen and play through the answer, but the real purpose of Endgame Play (and, I think, the whole of the GM Prep project) is to whip your chess into shape through practice.
Immediately the reader understands that this is not an endgame primer for that, Aagaard recommends Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual and de la Villa’s 100 Endgames You Must Know. Approximately one-third of the positions are ‘pure’ rook endings.Įach chapter begins with a short introduction to the topic at hand, and this is followed by the positions for solving. They are grouped into twelve chapters most of the chapters are constructed according to typical material, but the final three are devoted to key endgame themes.
(See my review of the second book, Positional Play, for more information on the series as a whole.) Endgame Play is, at root, a collection of 430 endgame positions along with their solutions.
Grandmaster Preparation: Endgame Play is the fifth book in the Grandmaster Preparation series. Now, having received Jacob Aagaard’s newest book, I have enough training material for the endgame to last me many, many months. (I will have a review and discussion of the Steps Method in the weeks to come.) I also deprioritized openings and emphasized endings, especially the playing out of set endgame positions against human opponents or weak computer engines with clock and board. First, I swallowed my pride and returned to the basics, starting at the beginning of the Stappenmethode series of workbooks and working through each Step (and Step Plus) in turn. In my on-going quest to break 1800, I’ve made a number of changes to my study habits.