Practical Endgame Play - Beyond the Basics: The Definitive Guide to the Endgames That Really Matter

Wonderful book!! It is generally known that every good and winning chess position, can corrupt if the chess player does not know how to handle the endgame. So this book is really huge but excellent organised and provide the chess players with many, many example of how to handle every different position. So every player can focus in the chapter, he feels he has the larger problems. In my opinion the book is suitable for intermediate players and club players, as it investigates many variations and sub-variations of each position. Beginners may find it difficult to read. The book will provide stronger players with a very good reference which, they will find very valuable during chess reading and their playing improvement. A real addition to the chess literature.

Living up to its subtitle, 'The definitive guide to the endgames that really matter', "Practical Endgame Play - Beyond The Basics" by English Grandmaster Glenn Flear" is a 544-page compendium dedicated solely to endgame plays in chess. Included are the most commonly encountered endgames; illustrative examinations of material balances found in roughly half of the endgames played; and sound advice, practical analysis, and endgame insights assisted by currently available computer software. Mastering the intricacies of the endgame is a fundamental chess skill. Without it, players are doomed to frustration and failure. With it, players can achieve the very heights of success. "Practical Endgame Play - Beyond The Basics" is a seminal and strongly recommended addition to personal, professional, and community library chess reference book collections.

Author Flear describes in his introduction how he wishes to take a different approach, stressing endgame variants that arise often in practice but generally aren't covered in endgame textbooks. In this, he has succeeded. He has compiled statistics on types of endgames and then concentrates, at least somewhat, on the ones that are more important in terms of likelihood of occurrence. Not at all a bad idea, as so many books want to be theoretically complete and spend many pages on endgames likely to be seen once or twice, if ever, in a chessplayer's career. Flear coins a new term: "Not Quite an Endgame" or "NQE" or, as he puts it, "nuckie." What is an NQE? He defines it rather unclearly as a position with more pieces than an endgame but no more than two per side (not counting pawns). This not so helpful definition is fairly carefully followed in the book, as two per side situations make up nearly the whole content of the text. What he does do is consider a whole raft of situations that, while statistically probable, aren't necessary treated in an organized manner in other books. This includes things like an exchange advantage with two rooks vs. a rook and a minor piece. Indeed this is "not quite" an endgame but how many times have you seen it in real play? Most likely very often indeed! Rook and minor piece endings are covered thoroughly, such as Rook and Bishop vs. Rook and Knight (and all the other combinations as well), again something seen all the time in practical play. I especially like the extended section on "Asymmetric Struggles" which considers such things as Rook vs. two minor pieces. Practical? You bet! The book is a real heavyweight, weighing in at over 500 pages. It has a useful table of contents, a not very useful index of players (and, in typical Everyman Chess style, no other indexes at all), and an attractive and readable layout with typically two or more very clear board diagrams per page. The list price is high enough, but you can get the book for just over half that price if you shop carefully. The key question, of course, is: should you buy this book? Certainly, if you were to have only one or two endgame books in your library, this wouldn't be one of them. (Silman's Complete Endgame Course would be better by far, and Pandolfini's Endgame Course would be a better choice as well.) However, I might say that if you have those other books, maybe this one would fit in as a third choice, just before you go in for a heavy-duty textbook such as Fine or one of the others. Flear's book is above all practical. After you learn the real basics in one of the "Course" books, you might go in for this very large serving of real-life situations. Only then might you want to learn everything there is to know about endgame theory, even if you might never use it. Bottom line: a good book, perhaps even an excellent book, but not a "must-buy."