I did go through the entire Levenfish and Smyslov book. I wouldn't go through an entire encyclopedia.

Thanks for your input. I am continuing with ECE and also the Löwenfisch/Smyslow book. When playing through the positions, did you do almost the entire book? Or is the kost to benefit ratio of doing that too low?

I focus a lot on the R+P v. R positions and they helped me a lot. I feel fairly confident if I had time trouble on increment after studying those.

I have now 1000 Turmendspiele, but not sure how to use it. I am on Example 343 of Encyclopædia of Chess Endings: Rook Endings I by Informator and am wondering how to use it. I am helped a lot by the exemples but it took me over a month just to get to 343. There are almost 2000 exemple positions, so it might literally take me more than a year to finish this bog. I think that it might be helpful to finish the whole bog, but almost 2000 exemples in 500 pages is a lot. Anyone here read the whole thing cower to cower?

I also bought the bog Rook Endings by Löwenfish and Smyslow and Comprehensiwe Chess Endings Volume V: Rook Endings by Awerbach and Grigorijiew for my birthday. Which order should I read these?

I wil definitely buy Müllers book, but that is quite far in the future, 2016 it seems?

Anyone know what the 1000 Turmendspiele buch is by Pintér? I cannot find an excerpt to see what kind of examples it is, or Table of Content.

I have been studying rook endgames for a while these past months, mostly with Nunn's Secrets of Rook Endgames and ECE Volume II. But I was looking at some of the "klassiks" like

1. Theorie und Praxis der Turmendspiele (Löwenfisch und Smyslow)
2. Rook Endings (Löwenfisch und Smyslow) [Is this the same book but in English?]
3. Practical Rook Endings (Mednis)

Books on rook endings I have read so far:

-Secrets of Rook Endings (Nunn)
-Dworetskij Endgame Manual (Dworetskij)
-The Survival Guide to Rook Endgames (Emms)
-A Practical Guide to Rook Endgames (Minew)
-Practical Endgame Play (Griwas)

Where do you find these three? Most seem sold out and the chess shops even do not have them. Are these the same thing or a good addition to Nunn's book, Dworetskij Endgame Manual, Müller/Lamprecht, ECE Volume II? Or am I just fine with these sources?

I saw some book called 1000 Turmendspiele by Joszéf Pintér. What kind of book is it? Is it like ECE?

I am very busy nowadays. So my chess plan is very limited. I cannot play for a long time so I plan to spend the rest of the year mastering rook endings. Then I continue to just trying to improve the rest of the endgames.

If you have other suggestions, feel free. I have a working knowledge of German, French, Dutch, and some others if there are good rook endgame books in those languages (especially German).

*I must note: I have ordered Praxis des Turmendspiels (Kortschnoj) and Geheimnisse der Turmendspiele (Smsyslow) from eurochess.de, last September. But to be honest I have no idea where the hell is my order. That is another story.

Am I totally wrong or shouldn't a thorough study of Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual combined with Aagaard's Endgame Play be sufficient for a 2300+ player to cover more or less all aspects of the endgame excellently? The nice thing with the two books is that they show so many errors which very strong players have made.

I assume that to be really good at rook endgames, you have to master pawn-endgames as you otherwise don't know when to exchange rooks. At the moment, I'm reading the chapter on Rubinstein in Learn from the Legends about rook endgames
which is truly enjoyful for me 

Honestly, I don't see the use of Nunn's book, except as a thought experiment. How many pages would it take to print an endgame table base?

You would probably only get marginally more utility from Nunn than from Nalimov.

I'd move on to other works personally.

I don't have a clear picture of the contents of the Shereshevsky books in terms of specific material, sorry. They are organized by strategic theme (Endgame Strategy) or opening/middlegame structure (Mastering the Endgame 1+2).

But regarding double rook endings, there is actually a brief chapter on that in the Emms book. And a longer one in Practical Endgame Play: Beyond the Basics by Flear. These are the two main sources I'm aware of for RR vs RR.

P.S. if you study the Emms book after Dvoretsky + Korchnoi, you will see a lot of the same stuff repeated. Might be an idea to have a look at the book before you buy, to see how much "new" material you're really getting (apart from the RR vs RR chapter, I'm not sure).

Maybe I was wrong to call Nunn's Chess Endings comprehensive. It isn't really a systematic treatment of theory at all, but rather a collection of often quite tactical situations taken from practical play, which require accurate calculation and still illustrate plenty of common themes. So it should be a good add-on to a study of, for example, the Dvoretsky, Emms or Averbakh/Kopaev material, since it duplicates very little of it. Of course there are other sources for tactical rook endings, like Minev (much more basic, but good) and Van Perlo (which I haven't seen, but everybody seems to love it).

I notice most of the Rook endings section of NCE 2 has quite reduced material, up to just 2 pawns vs 1. But there are some 70 pages with more complicated examples at the end.

If you're looking for "untheoretical" material with up to 6-7 pawns each, maybe you'll need to look for examples in more strategic endgame books, like the ones by Müller/Pajeken, Lars Bo Hansen, Hellsten and Shereshesky (including his two with Slutsky). Most theoretical books, like Emms and Averbakh/Kopaev, go up to 4 pawns vs 3, with just a few examples of endings with more pawns.

I haven't studied any book on rook endings in depth, but of the ones I own or have looked at, the most complete/comprehensive are Averbakh and Kopaev's volume 5 from Comprehensive Chess Endings and Nunn's Chess Endings, volume 2.

Nunn's other book Secrets of Rook Endings isn't really comprehensive, since it's exclusively on Rook + pawn vs Rook, though Nunn helpfully points out the most important positions for practical play in every section, so it's possible to study only those. The Averbakh/Kopaev volume now comes with lots of "potentially out-of-date" warnings. Convekta released Comprehensive Chess Endings with updated analysis on CD some time in the 2000s, but it seems to be impossible to find now.

Honestly I suspect you'd be on a strong GM level in rook endings with the Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual chapter plus the Emms and Korchnoi books (though these two should probably also be checked against the most recent tablebases), if you knew all of that by heart.

Seeing these references to "(really) mastering" Rook endings, one thing I think of is the fact that John Nunn wrote a 350-page book on R+P vs. R.

DenVerdsligeRejsende wrote on 07/17/15 at 02:50:08:

You can probably look at your last hundred games or so, estimate how many half-points you would have gained from knowing rook endgames a bit better (and applying that knowledge successfully!), and figure out what the effect would have been on your rating.

I note that all the rook endgame books are filled with terrible blunders by 2600+ rated players, who somehow got to that level while still making big mistakes in relatively elementary positions.

Quote:

That seems like a good enough reason on its own to study them further!

It is by Olms and says 2nd edition 2002. I guess the first was the german edition. I think I got it at Schackhandeln in Stockholm quite a long time ago.

Is that Korthscnoj book a different book, or same as the German book Praxis des Turmendspiels? I saw a German book by Olms long time ago as a junior but never bought it. Any endgame book by Kortschnoj is bound to be great. I wonder where they sell that one.

What is a good book that is focussed exclusively on rook endgames, that can be useful for 2300+, going from the basic known stuff like Philidor and Lucena but also having complicated examples with rook + 5 pawns vs. rook + 5 pawns? Basically rook endgames that just came from a middlegame.

As a Caro-Kann player, stuff like double rook endgames like 2R6P vs. 2R6P is not uncommon. Which kind of book discusses this stuff in addition to the simpler theoretical positions?