Endgame Challenge

This is an excellent book to have in your endgame armamaterium. The book is set up as puzzles with certain endgame ideas in mind. Other endgame books offer more written theory but a lot less examples, so this book works well in combination with one of those books. Even alone its a great book since it trains you to calculate a bit deeper, 7 to 9 moves out. The way I used the book was to go over the chapters one by one with out using a board, this helped develope visualization and calculation, once I completed a chapter I went back to the beggining of that chater and entered the position into chessmaster and tried to see if I could remember how to win the won position. I highly recommend this book.

This is a book that I would recommend to those who want to improve their endgame skills, by learning through a "do it yourself" method. Not recommended for beginners: to find many of the solutions the reader must deal with some subtleties that require some experience on the game.

One of the basic advices is that you should study tactical puzzles repeatedly to improve in chess. I wonder way this advice is not given for other parts in chess, for instance endgame. Hall's "Endgame Challenge!" consists of 451 endgame puzzles. My belief is that by going through these puzzles over and over again, will dramatically improve your endgame understanding. You can buy yourselves an endgame reference book, like Muller and Lambrecht's "Fundamental Chess Endings", but in addition buy Halls puzzle book. When you have reached a rating over 1800, you can start to study "Fundamental Chess Endings more deeply. Until then, use it only as a reference in addition to Hall's "Endgame Challenge!".

This book contains 451 endgame puzzles, grouped together by endgame themes. These themes cover the almost all major subheadings of endgame theory: king and pawn endings, knight and pawn endings, bishop and pawn endings, rook and pawn endings, bishop vs knight endings, rook and minor piece endings, and queen endings. Each section contains about 60 endings, arranged three to a page. Each puzzle is accompanied by a verbal hint and a rating of the complexity of the puzzle - one of easy, moderate, or difficult. Comprehensive solutions to each puzzle are presented at the end of each section. Through its puzzles, the book is able to convey much of the basic theory of endgame study. Many of the "standard" endgame positions can be found within such as the Philidor position in rook and pawn endings and "Reti's Idea" in king and pawn endings. Endgame puzzles are a great way to increase ones calculation ability, and this book isn't short on puzzles which require 7 or 8 moves of accurate calculation to reach a favorable outcome. Studied alone, this book is sure to increase ones endgame understanding. However, I prefer to use it as a supplement book. I'll follow each chapter of endgame theory from a more comprehensive book with a series of puzzles from the equivalent section of this book. In this way, the lessons from the theory book are reinforced through exercises.

Most of the Chess world considers the endgame boring. And most of the Chess world never studies it. This book Endgame Challenge can make you an endgame master. Not only with the basic principles, but calculation and visualization too. Endgame problems do just as much as middle game problems do if not more. This fun book will make you work for the answers, but when you find them you'll be pround of yourself and the work you put into them. Find the beauty in the endgame and make the small investment. You'll be happy that you did.