Comprehensive Chess Endings Vol 2 Pdf
Agnella Datson
My suggestion are Glen Flear's 2 books, Practical chess endings, in 2 volumes: "Learning the Basics", and "Beyond the Basics." For example, If you look up Rook and Bishop vs. Rook and knight in the beyond the basics volume, there are about 50 examples.
@BorgQueen : Harold van der Heijden is a very well-known International Studies Judge and a well-known figure in chess composition. His studies database has been around for years and is the absolute worldwide reference in this field.
It's also just a PGN file with studies, you need to use other software to look at them, search through them, et cetera. It's raw data. It's also only what it is, a vast collection of endgame studies. It's not a collection of endgame lessons or instructional endgame positions and specifically lacks typical theoretical endgame positions since they wouldn't make for original studies.
All the books you mentioned are way too deep for a beginner! (Yeah I know you don't care about that minor detail) I have Averbakh's books and they are encyclopedic and I've read that computer analysis has found them to be chock full of errors, but I suppose they'd be useful if you could read them, say on a full-time basis (40 hrs/wk) for a minimum of several wks, probably more like several months. Maybe, possibly, perhaps. Do you want to actually learn how to play endgames, or do you prefer being a librarian?
Endgames are concrete and analytical, therefore with a catalog of endgame positions, one ought to be able to progress through several similar type endgame positions, working from simple to complex and therefore vastly improve not only one's endgame play, but also one's overall chess strength. This works because endgame knowledge is essentially immutable (compared to openings and middlegames).
In doing this, several commonly known principles are sure to redemonstrate themselves (opposition, triangulation, zugzwang, how to use a passed pawn on the opposite side of the board, how to use a king and bishop to blockade enemy pawns, lucena/philidor, rooks behind passed pawn, etc.), however you'd have the concrete analysis (automatically covering "exceptions), rather than having to "intuit" how to play certain more complicated endgames based on general principles, which isn't going to work for most of us who are not GM's.
Is Averbakh's Comprehensive Chess Endings on CD/DVD (Convekta) worth buying as a one-stop shop for long-term systematic incremental progressive endgame training? Is it accessible to a lower-level player?
2. Because Averbakh is a one-stop-shop, I assume there'd be less overlap of exact positions (as there would be if I read through all of the above books), yet plenty of positions which are similar but slightly different, yet illustrate the same basic principles (and more advanced principles), which I think is better for truly learning something well.
3. Finally, since it is software, I assume the pre-set positions will allow me to play through far more variations than I would if I had to set/reset positions OTB or on computer or try to imagine move sequences with my (lack of) imagination. I simply need to make the most use of my limited time.
I see this thread EXCELLENT END GAME SOURCE which briefly talks about it, and in it there is a suggestion by the last poster to get Silman, Pandolfini, Seirawan first, but then there is the issue of books vs computer and the benefit of prose versus the lost time efficiencies with books. Anyone agree/disagree? Even funnier is that I mention those books above in my first post in this thread before linking the other thread. That is like Twilight Zone in my world which is this post where I am an island among uh land and/or peninsulas. This will be my home. It's nice here because of the stream....of consciousness is the end of that sentence bu-yaa sweet sassy molassy.
It's like episode 1 season 1 of the Twilight Zone in this post. I own all but the 5th season. That show is awesome. Haven't seen Serling's Night Gallery though. I am eager to see some episodes because of the uniformly bad reviews it received. Did you know Serling died after a coronary bypass graft procedure in 1975? I did. Wikipedia doesn't lie. It's not a sleeping dog, so you can't let it regardless.
I finally bought Seasons 1 & 2 of Night Gallery by Rod Serling...it's freaking awesome, like a sequel to Twilight Zone, but perhaps because it wasn't so well-received because it was in color instead of black and white and gray, in which simplistic story lines are more accepted since it was in the "old" times. Much like many suggested chess books. I mean "Winning Chess Tactics", c'mon...obsolete in this day and age of tactics trainers which load position after position after position, 10x faster than setting it up on a board and translating algebraic or descriptive notation OTB. Serling is a super-GM of TV writing.
Speaking of super-GM's, isn't it said that 2700 is the consensus Elo level for such a title? Yet, soon 2700 will be considered "weak" GM as more GM's break 2800 and start heading toward 2900. I would think that qualifying for the candidate cycle or achieving a particular ranking or a number of elite level tournament placings would be more accurate in deeming who is a super-GM, because later people will say "oh Morphy and Capablanca sucked...I'd never fall for those lines that have been analyzed a million times by GMs and strong engines that I have memorized for my opening repertoire". Human garbage.
As far as endgames go, however, I put a bunch of endgame positions in chess openings wizard and it's great because you can train them and train through the alternative moves the opponent may consider in any endgame sequence in an attempt to swindle, trap, or stalemate you. If it's good enough for Capablanca (endgames, not COW, which wasn't around before 1942), then it is good enough for me, even though I would never fall for those lines he fell for, that primitive earth-champ of the '20's of yester-century.
However, Mr. Serling did die from complications of open-heart surgery. Serling, a heavy smoker with a family history of heart problems, had suffered two heart attacks in 1975, warranting a then-risky coronary bypass operation. The third and final heart attack was suffered during or shortly after the operation, and this one killed him. He was 50 years old.
I look at Averkakh's books more often than I do the CD's (the interface seems a little clunky to me), but I've heard that the CD's have corrections on the books. Both are filled with insights and good for reference.
Thanks for the Averbakh comment...Is there a training feature? I'd think that endgame training could easily be done like a Tactics Trainer since analysis is quite concrete, so I am shocked that there aren't more "Endgame Trainers" out there. Just a lot of software that reads like books, though faster to read through since you don't have to set up all the positions. Why doesn't Nunn put his Endgame volumes into DVD format and allow a training option?
Yes, apparently Serling's father and grandfather died in their 50's from heart problems, plus all that smoking. In the Twilight Zone DVD's (I forget which season), he gives a preview of the next week's episode and afterwards he verbally endorses a particular brand of cigarettes (before the Surgeon General's warning, which I believe was in 1964), it's funny to me because it is different and I like to laugh at things done in the primitive old days just like I laugh at Morphy's crappy moves OTB that any 2300-level idiot would never fall for, assuming they of course memorized their "theory" and memorized that particular game.
Another good TV series in the vein of twilight zone is the British series Tales of the Unexpected based on short stories mostly written by Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach author). I bought the first 2 seasons.
The interface appears to be Chess Assistant 10. You can add variations, and play out positions against an engine. I don't see a specific training mode listed in the help file, but perhaps you could just hide the notation window, work out your solution, and then check it against the listed lines.
I think a key question that this thread brings to mind is: how was Rod Serling at endgames? Had he acquired the necessary technique to win won games, or was he prone to drifting, slipping in spite checks when he should have been triangulating his king? How did he compare with Capablanca?
I don't think twist endings were really Capa's forte. He prefered to slowly build the tension until the ending just seemed like a natural outcome of all the earlier goings-on. Very different from Serling and Hitchcock.
Many chess masters have contributed to the theory of endgames over the centuries, including Ruy Lpez de Segura, Franois-Andr Philidor, Josef Kling and Bernhard Horwitz, Johann Berger, Alexey Troitsky, Yuri Averbakh, and Reuben Fine. Ken Thompson, Eugene Nalimov, and other computer scientists have contributed by constructing endgame tablebases.
c80f0f1006