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Pandolfini's Endgame Course : Basic Endgame Concepts Explained by America's Leading Chess Teacher

Pandolfini's Endgame Course : Basic Endgame Concepts Explained by America's Leading Chess Teacher

List Price: $13.00
Your Price: $9.75
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent Book for the Beginner/Advanced Beginner
Review: As a fellow chess author I highly recommend this book for players rated under 1100 as one of the best first books to get on the endgame. I know Bruce Pandolfini personally and he loves chess and the work he does. This is one of his finest books.
Bruce nicely covers the basic endgames and provides positions that a chess teacher can easily use in the classroom.


Rating: 5 stars
Summary: makes memorization of endgame technique easier
Review: As a player of modest ability who only played in two tournaments (probably a year or two apart), I found the book quite useful. Some of the other books that I had tried to read on the endgame just seemed too darn difficult for beginners. The difficulty was that there was just so much information to memorize. Pandolfini's book made the memorization of the themes much easier by giving each technique a catchy name. Then, you are led step by step to more complicated techniques by successively building upon the ones you have just learned. This is good pedagogy. I would recommend this to any beginner to get a good understanding of what you need to know to play the endgame.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: review of Panfolfini's Endgame Course
Review: Bruce Pandolfini has written another book to help the beginner to intermediate player master the principles of chess. This particular book focuses on the important subject of endgame tactics. Not exactly a "course", as the title indicates, the book is a sequence of 239 endgame positions, including a diagram of each position, a goal to be pursued (e.g., White to move and win), commentary on possible lines, and the final solution (or solutions) in boldface. The idea of a sequence of particular problems is a good one, but it should be supplemented with some summarizing material from time to time to explain the ideas pertinent to each group of problems. Pandolfini does not do this, even though there is a natural (and one would think compulsory) opportunity at the beginning of each chapter. The only such material is presented at the beginning of each of the three parts of the book (the parts are Pieces in Action, The Pawns in Action, and Pieces and Pawns in Action), but this material is very slight and does not accomplish the task indicated above. Overall I enjoyed this book and learned from it. As a B player, I found many of the positions not only instructive and interesting, but also easy to remember because of Pandolfini's descriptive tags for each problem (e.g., Stepping into the Square, and Diagonal Squeeze). However, the book's clarity and usefulness is at times diminished by the incredible number of typographical and other errors. A chess book should be free of errors which distract or confuse the student, but this book abounds in them. The goals of many of the problems are incorrectly stated, the typical error being that a position labeled "White to move and win" is merely a position to be drawn (e.g., Endgames 186, 189, 195, just to name a few). Other positions are either incorrectly diagrammed or else contain some other error. For example, in Endgame 149 White is to move and draw by allowing Black to promote a pawn and then forking the newly created piece and King. The error is that White's King is sitting on the first rank and is put into check if Black's pawn is promoted to a Queen, so White never gets the chance to apply the fork. And there are many other instances of incorrect diagrams, incorrect commentaries (i.e., they don't match the diagrams) and other "minor" errors that make the book especially difficult to read for the very audience for which it is intended. Be that as it may, this book may be enjoyed and read profitably by the beginning or intermediate chess player. Once it is thoroughly proofread it will join some of Pandolfini's most instructive books (e.g., The ABC's of Chess).

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The best tool to learn the basics
Review: Ever since I bought this book, my skills have been improving every single day, from being an absolute begginer, now I can play reasonably well against players between 1500 - 1700, and I've never lost or tied a game which should have been won, something that used to happened a lot. Let me give you an example, just after a couple of weeks I started reviewing the exercises I came to a game in which there was my king against a king and a pawn, a lost game you could think, but I used the recently learned techniques and managed to take my king just in front of the pawn and the enemy king was forced to stay behing it, so my opponent kept on pushing me backwards, but I never let him put his king in front of his pawn, in other words, I never let him win the opposition, so at the end he stalemated. The best part is that I never lost my nerve because I just KNEW the position could not be won, it's just great to make every move knowing exactly what you're doing. I could say a lot more, but I'll leve it here by just giving a little advise: put away all your oppening books and start learning this one by heart, it will rocket your abilities faster and in a more eficient way.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A good reference on Endgame Positions.
Review: Generaly speaking I don't like alegraic notation books written
since the computer age got really going about 1980. This book
sort of fits in that category but it could be considered by the
old standards as a good mini-encyclopedia on chess endings.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Start your endgame study here!
Review: good beginner book, endgame study is very important so better study up! this is a good place to start then move on to Fundamental Chess Endings

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent for up to 1600, basic endings
Review: I cannot believe i am recommending a Pandolfini book, but ... This is an excellent book on the basic endgames that everyone has to know.

Also good is Chernev's 300 endgames from Dover.

Up to 1600, but I would bet some players up to 2000 could benefit from parts of it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Use your computer with this book!
Review: I found the best way to study this book is to use my computer.
Unless you've read tons of chessbooks, or can play blindfolded, you probably could use some help with thinking through the moves in the book.

The author recommends sitting at a chessboard, and that works fine too, but your computer has some advantages. With your computer you can set up the position, make the moves, and then start at the beginning again. You can't "rewind" your chessboard like this! Also, some examples have two different variations, with your computer you can go to the starting position and then make the moves for the next variation.

Any computer chess software should be able to do this for you, I just use the free blitzin software that I use to play online at ICC (chessclub.com).

I think Pandolfini's Endgame Course is a great book. Most other reviewers have stated the nuts and bolts of the book, but I wanted to share the best method I found for studying it. Don't get me wrong, it's nothing super difficult, but using your computer can save you time and make it a little easier. Also, don't feel the need to go through the book in one sitting. There are 240 examples, you could go through 24 a day and be done in 10 days. That's better than trying to cram or never reading through the book at all!

I have most of Pandolfini's books, while all of them are good, some are better than others. This is one of the better ones. Weapons of Chess is also very good, it's an encyclopedia of chess strategy, very helpful.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Pandolfini's endgame course- Best for learning & past time
Review: I have just started to learn chess in order to teach my grand son this Royal game. I believe this book is a wonderful start for me. While going through this book I find some typing (printing) mistakes eg page 34 Bb7 should be (as I understand)Bg7.I wanted to contact the writer for correction in its next edition but I could not find his e-mail address.With my little or no knowledge about this game I can hardly be an authority to comment on finer points of this book however I have an educated belief that if you start learning chess with this book you will be able to Learn the basics of the game fast Enjoy this book as a very good companion for your past time

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Wonderful format and scope, but incomplete discussions.
Review: I have used this book for several years as my only endgame reference. It is modular, and has a step by step instuctional format.

I have found it very instructional and practical and have benefited greatly in my game as a direct result of this work. It has improved my midgame as much as my endgame!

I will say that the descriptive text is somewhat brief, making working through the lessons more difficult than it could be.


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