Secrets of Chess Endgame Strategy

by Lars Bo Hansen

A large proportion of chess games are decided in the endgame or in the transition to the endgame, but chess literature has provided relatively little guidance for players seeking to improve their skill in making the vital decisions in these phases of the game.

Building on the ideas introduced in his ground-breaking work Foundations of Chess Strategy , Lars Bo Hansen provides a thought-provoking and convincing treatise on general endgame strategy. He explains how players can maximize the practical problems for their opponents while emphasizing the strengths of their own position. Under his guidance, chess-players will more easily focus on the key elements in the position, devise plans for exploiting them to the full, and develop a better understanding of which pieces need to be exchanged, and which weaknesses really matter.

Part 1 of the book discusses the basic principles of endgame strategy and the thinking methods associated with them. In Part 2, Hansen moves on to consider a wealth of examples by the great masters of chess, showing how they have handled endgames in practice, often making difficult tasks appear simple, and in many cases bamboozling their opponents into self-destruction.

Genres: Chess

224 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2006

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is like Shereshevsky's 'Endgame Strategy': it covers (more or less) the same topics - but with many new examples. Although that means that Hansen's book doesn't bring any new discovery, on the other hand it still offers a chance to go through the well-known topics with a fresh material. For example, Shereshevsky's principle 'Don't hurry!" is nicely presented by the game Khalifman-Van Well (page 27), where White used every opportunity to repeat twice the same position.
To conclude, it was quite a pleasure to read this book.