Starting Out: Minor Piece Endgames

Rating:
Summary: Minor pieces
Review: Anyone who plays chess in tournaments generally has acquired some knowledge of endgames. But how much?

Well, in my experience, one learns the most about rook endgames. That means that most tournament players know all about getting one's rook to the seventh, keeping one's rook active, getting it behind a passed pawn, and winning won endgames with rook and pawn against rook.

But what about the endgames in this book? What if you have only a minor piece versus pawns, or a piece and pawn against a pawn? Or if you have one or two extra pawns where each side has a knight, or bishops of the same color, or bishops of opposite colors?

Well, there is one lucky case: everyone knows what to do with a bishop against a bishop of the opposite color and one pawn. The rest of it is what one has to learn, not just so that one will be able to play these endgames but so that one will know whether to try to aim for one of them during a game. I think many tournament players are surprisingly weak at just these endgames.

I think Emms does a good job. This book is quite readable for any chess player. And there are also 32 good exercises, with detailed solutions at the end of the book. It should go a long way towards bringing readers up to speed on these positions.

Did Emms omit anything I would have included? Yes. Emms never gives either side more than one piece. So we don't see two bishops against a knight or two knights against a bishop, with or without pawns. We don't see the basic mates with bishop and knight against a king, two bishops against a king, three knights against a king, or the instructive two knights versus king and pawn. Still, I think these are minor omissions.

I highly recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: Getting to the Next Level
Review: Having been stuck at 1765 uscf for quite some time, I wondered what it would take to crash through to the A class level. More opening knowledge? (couldn't hurt) Better tactics? (no doubt!) However, it finally dawned on me that I had a very poor understanding of how to utilize Knights and Bishops. I guess I just never realized how much there was to know about these two little guys. Luckily, I came across this new book by GM Emms, and have found it both enlightening and enjoyable to read. I simply set up each position on Chessbase 8, and then holding the book, click through his lines. I find that after going through 3 or 4 examples, I gain a new insight into just exactly what I'm suppose to be doing in these types of positions, where before I was simply clueless. As you can tell, I highly recommend this book to the struggling class player who wants to break through to the next level.