Practical Endgame Play - Mastering the Basics: The Essential Guide To Endgame Fundamentals (Everyman Chess)

I love the endgame and I read more endgame books than I should. This is a really great, wide selection of foundational material ("basic" is a bit of an oversell) with decent, but not exceptional, instructional notes. It is consumable by mortals but it's not going to hold your hand. It is well organized and would do just fine as a reference book too.This would be a fine only or first (real) endgame book for someone with the drive to do the hard work that it involves. The positions, while not all basic, are not particularly difficult and should be accessible to most intermediates and there are a bunch of them. Get through this and you certainly have a sound, practical foundation - especially in rook endings. It is intended for someone with ambition or a love of the endgame. While all the material is practical, the book makes no attempt to give you a "minimum possible set" of basic positions like, say, Silman's book so it takes more discipline and desire to make the most of it. I had to play many of the positions out on an analysis board so I would say it might not be suitable for studying away from the board.I love this book. It doesn't have the depth of Emms' Survival Guide to Rook Endings, or the spoon feeding of Silman's Complete Endgame Course, but it has a very good practical selection of material and would make an ideal course for self-study. Buy it with confidence when you're ready to get serious.Update: The only qualification I would add though, is that if you're sufficiently dedicated to work through this one you're probably sufficiently dedicated to work through Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual. I haven't done that yet, but everyone seems to agree that it is the gold standard.

The positions are to the point without excess. Grivas used many examples from his own play, which is OK. I don't think the book was meant for total beginners in the endgame which is fine for me. Most of the verbal descriptions are there to first explain the general idea then later explain a critical situation. If a move comes up that does not make sense, then you probably need to review some previous diagram. The chapters on Rook endings are absolutely worth buying this book.

Excellent!!

I'm returning this book. The endgame examples Grivas gives are probably appropriate for the idea he's trying to convey, if you can ever figure out what that is...because he doesn't really explain it in English. Instead, he gives a variation, then a side variation, then another one, until you are lostin a thicket of variations and have no clue what the main idea of the endgame is, and are left with only the vague notion that "endgames are very tricky". It leaves you with a sense that you haven't learned anything, and if the position ever showed up in your games, you wouldn't have a clue how to handle it or why. Bad instruction. Also, Grivas must have relied heavily on a computer engine (which is fine) because he gives very odd moves and puts an "!" next to it, and many diagrams have several "!" moves which are counter-intuitive to humans and not explained at all by Grivas. I could have done the same thing with Fritz myself. Except Grivas does not mention or credit any computer program (in the intro, back cover or diagram itself) for these strange and strong moves, taking the credit himself. His paltry discussion of Corresponding Squares is only confusing, and Grivas does not use obvious graphical tools to illustrate ideas (such as Square of the Pawn, Critical squares, etc.) instead just giving diagram after diagram.Avoid this book if you want to understand BASIC endgame play. Pandolfini's Endgame Course is more suitable. Pandolfini explains things very well, in English, and does not simply put an "!" after a very strange move, but explains why.

This book is a very thorough introduction to endgame play with many recent grandmaster examples. Since since many endgames in this book have been analyzed elsewhere the analysis does not deviate from standard conclusions reached in many sources. However, many books on the endgame these days offer more strategic ideas (for instance Lars Bo Hansen, Secrets of Chess Endgame Strategy) or more conclusive hand analysis (for instance Beliavsky's books). My main complaints are: (1) lots of unchecked analysis and (2) not enough practical guidance, for instance many endgames are only interesting in terms of transition to the endgame or the first few moves which determine the character of the position.