Oh thanks.

Thanks gabriel for the link and willempie for the advice. A coach wouldn't work for me. Never had enough money to afford one and have gone solo with chess my entire life. Might have helped when I was a kid to have one, but I don't think he/she would help as much now. I have a better idea of what to study and what Im doing, and can always ask for advice here if I need help or a strong player's opinion.

I think you mean "100 endgames you must know"  (rather than 1000) 

Looks like a lot and I think you may miss out on practice this way. I would add something like chesstactics.com where you can play won endgames (eg R+p vs R). I have started using shredder in combination with Freezer to do similar things.

Btw It depends on what you like with books. The following is completely subjective: M&L is very good, but encyclopedic. Silman I can't judge, but many seem to like it. Dvoretsky somehow never interests me as I think it is dry. I quite like Flear's endgame books (I have improving and mastering the endgame), in particular I like the way he intermixes theory and practical advice.

Ametanoitos wrote on 06/09/10 at 11:08:19:


Thanks for the advice and I do study tactics a lot. Don't worry, I find chess interesting and have the motivation to do this type of "boring" work. Being good at endgames is a goal I'm willing to put in the work for.

No, this is not a good plan to study endgames. You will be bored to death! If you want to study an endgame book fine, but study ALL these? I don't know even professionals to do this kind of work! Use the books as reference points and analyse with their help the endgames that occur to your games. A better way to climb the elo scale is to study tactics, play 10 min games on the internet using a stict opening repertoire and analyse every game afterwards and create an "interesting positions base" out of these games that you will revisit time to time. If an interesting endgame occurs then study it. You'll have a good time, learn a lot, gain experience and identify your weak spots much easier.

Well at 2200 I still find Soltis useful, but then I'm not very strong in the endgame. Soltis writes a lot about thinking methods and attitude while the others are more into typical positions and strategies.

Shereshevsky, Hansen and the others take many of Soltis' insights for granted, so I think of it more as a "starter course", not a complete strategy course in itself. If you have a good "feel" for the endgame already you may not need it.

Hard to say. Strategic endgames are more frequent in practice than technical ones so in that sense they should have priority, but of course good strategic endgame play often requires knowledge of the technical positions that can arise!

One possibility is to study Dvoretsky's essential material (marked in blue) first, then a good strategic book, and finally the rest of Dvoretsky.

P. S. To clarify: the Soltis book I mentioned is "Turning Advantage Into Victory in Chess" (he also has another endgame book I like). It should be clearly easier than Shereshevsky (which has Dvoretsky's stamp of approval) and Müller/Pajeken, with Hansen somewhere in-between. Only two of the four have exercises which I find a useful feature: Soltis (a few) and Müller/Pajeken (many). And there's also Excelling at Technical Chess by Agaard - really a wide choice here.

Flear's Practical Endgame Play is also sort of a strategy book, but limited to two pieces each, and arranged by material instead of by theme. I think it's easier to study if you've worked with a more typical strategy book first.

P. P. S. The Bán tactics book I mentioned comes only in old descriptive notation if that's an issue.