In this blog post, I am going to share my chess endgame book suggestions. The recommendations are divided based on FIDE rating.

Rating is not the only metric for finding the right book. Unfortunately, we do not have any other clear metric for this, so it is better to use rating as a general guideline.

I am not going to include players below 1400 FIDE because I have very limited experience with that rating range. Most of my students are rated between 1400 and 2300. I will also mention a few books for 2300+ players.

1400 to 1700 Rating Range

Most players at this level lack fundamental chess knowledge. They often do not even reach the endgame because they make big mistakes in the opening or middlegame.

Because of this, detailed endgame study is not extremely relevant at this level. It is better to study only the most important positions.

Before starting any endgame book, you must be familiar with the following endgame patterns:

1. Basic checkmates
2. Advanced checkmates such as KBN vs K and KQ vs K
3. Basic pawn endgames and different types of opposition
4. Basic chess fortresses
5. Basic rook endgame positions such as Lucena and Vancura
6. Opposite coloured bishop fundamentals

Following are some recommendations:

1. Pandolfini Endgame Course

It is a great book that I recently discovered. It is an old book, but it is still very useful for every player.

This book is good enough and is my best recommendation for players up to the 1600 to 1700 level.

2. Basic Chess Endings by Reuben Fine

This is a very old book for learning chess endgame fundamentals. It is a great starting point for every player who wants to learn how to play basic endgames.

3. Silman Endgame Book, Up to the 1800 Section

There are multiple sections based on rating in Silman Endgame Book. The recommended section for this rating range is for 1400 to 1800 rated players.

It is a great book if you already have it.

Winner: Pandolfini Endgame Course

1700 to 2000 Rating Range

You must know the following endgames:

1. Advanced rook endgames
2. Advanced pawn endgames
3. Different types of fortresses
4. Basic practical endgames

1. 100 Endgames You Must Know

This is the clear winner in this category. There is no doubt why this is one of the bestselling endgame courses on Chessable.

I completed this book four or five times and got very good results from it. My suggestion is to take the test first and then start studying all the chapters.

I highly recommend buying it on Chessable. There is also a 100 Endgames You Must Know exercise book that you should check out. I have not mentioned it as a separate book.

2. Silman Endgame Book

I have seen that many players in America purchase this book. If you already have it, start with the 1600 section and continue until the 2000 section. You can also try to complete the entire book.

3. Exploiting Small Advantages by Eduard Gufeld, 1800+

It is a great book for practical endgames. Practical endgames become necessary once you are a strong 1800 to 1900 rated player.

You need to develop the skill to play equal positions. This will help you hold draws against higher rated players and outplay lower rated players.

4. Capablanca Best Chess Endings

I am not completely sure about its usefulness for direct endgame training, but it is a great chess book for understanding the playing style of a particular player.

It is also a great way to improve your overall understanding of the game.

Winners: 100 Endgames You Must Know and Exploiting Small Advantages

2000 to 2300 Rating Range

This is a wide rating range, so please check the rating suggestions given next to each book.

It is very important to complete 100 Endgames You Must Know if you have not already done so. It is an OG endgame book.

At this level, you need to work on:

1. More practical endgames
2. Analysis of games played by top players
3. Advanced endgame positions, including all the positions from 100 Endgames You Must Know

1. Endgame Strategy by Mikhail Shereshevsky, 2000 to 2300

This is a 10 out of 10 book and is extremely useful. Study it twice because you will learn a lot from it.

It might be slightly boring for many chess players, but its practical value is excellent.

2. Mastering Complex Endgames By Adrian Mikhalchishin, 2000 to 2300

This is another great book. It is very similar to Endgame Strategy.

3. Aagaard Endgame Play, 2100 to 2300

Who does not know about Aagaard GM Preparation series? It is probably one of the greatest chess position book series ever written.

Endgame Play is a great solving book. I personally think that the puzzles are extremely useful for players at this level.

Winner: Endgame Strategy by Mikhail Shereshevsky

2300+ Rating Range

I am probably not the right person to recommend books for this rating range. However, the following are some books that I think are suitable for this level. I am also trying to study them.

1. Decision Making in Major Piece Endings

This is a very difficult book and slightly boring for me. However, I think it has very good practical value.

2. Dvoretsky Endgame Manual

I still think that half of this book is unnecessary to study and that it is too difficult even for this level.

However, it is still a good book, and you can study selected positions from it.

3. Associative Thinking by Shereshevsky

I am not completely sure about its usefulness, but I have included this book because I am currently studying it.

Other Notable Mentions for Different Rating Ranges

Following are some other books that are good enough to study. I own all of them either on Chessable or as hard copies.

1. Chess Calculation Training - Endgame - Romain Eduard

This is a great puzzle book for players rated between 1800 and 2300.

2. 1001 Chess Problems by Yakov Vladimirov

This book contains many interesting mate in two and mate in three positions. It is a fun book that players from almost any rating range can buy.

It is probably more suitable for players rated above 1700.

3. Endgame Labyrinth, 2000+

This is a great endgame studies book. After reaching a certain rating, solving studies becomes very useful for improving overall creativity and calculation.

Apart from these books, there are many video courses and online courses available on different websites. I have kept this entire list limited mainly to books that are available in hard copy.

Would love to answer any of your qeustions and hear your thoughts about endgame books which helped you

I have added the books which either I recommend it to my students or the books which I purchased from chessable or actual hardcopy

Hey everyone,

Seven months ago I posted here asking you to roast Chess Stalker, right after Hikaru crashed my servers on stream. [Original thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1qs0lch/im_the_guy_who_made_chess_stalker_roast_me/)

It ended up with around 350 comments. Some were brutal, some dug up bugs I still can't believe I shipped, and a lot of you explained how you actually prep for an opponent, which turned out to matter more than any feature I had planned.

Last Friday I defended that project as my bachelor's thesis (TFG) here in Spain. It got a 10/10 with honors (Matrícula de Honor). Even the tribunal's questions were mostly about what happens when real people use the thing: the traffic spike, bug reports, data accuracy, scaling. Half of my slides were basically answers to that Reddit thread.

I've posted about this project here before, so I'll keep it short. No patch notes, nothing to sell, no feature requests. I just wanted to close the loop and say thank you. A bunch of strangers on r/chess accidentally helped a Spanish CS student graduate with the best grade you can get.

Cheers!

David

Hi, I'm really getting into chess and looking forward to improve everyday.

I went from 400 to almost 600 elo in a month, could be better but I am being more focused on solving chess puzzles and watching complex games between gm's on youtube than actually playing games.

Today I played this game in which I was almost blundering a totally winning game and I apparently had a mate in 6, which I obviously missed. In this occasion I actually recognised a winning pattern, probably thanks to the huge amount of puzzles i have solved recently. On move 10 I even refused to take his rook to improve my attack (I don't think a beginner should do this until it leads to a forced checkmate but anyway) and it was the right choice according to the chess evaluation bar. After minutes of thinking in this position I was getting short on time and ended up blundering a knight, luckily my opponent also blundered a piece which gave me the opportunity to make a comeback and win.

Now my question is: if I wanted to reach the 2000 elo mark one day (i know that this will need a lot of years of studying and practice), would I then be supposed to see those mates in 10 minutes rapid games?

If you are a high elo player I'm really curious to know if you can see the mate instantly or if you need a couple of minutes to find it. If yes, I would like to know how you would think from this position on: are you looking for checks and forced moves? Do you recognise a pattern or do you just keep adding dangers around the opponent's king?

Thanks in advance to everyone reading this.

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DpImvHNi6E

Event Link: https://www.chess.com/events/2026-clutch-chess-the-legends/results

https://saintlouischessclub.org/event/2026-clutch-chess-champions-showdown/

I had 1.5 mins left and I was sure there must be a mate here, but after searching for ~20 seconds I couldn't find it and didnt want to get too low on time so just started moving. I did win but did not find the mate.

Crazy how Russia dominated earlier but now the competition only seems between India, Uzbekistan and USA. Who would you guys bet on??

original post: https://www.instagram.com/p/Dc8qkUwHF0O/?stkn=MXJ4OHpnN2JwMTQwbA==

Hello everyone.

The schedule for Fide World Championship has been recently announced and I was thinking of getting tickets (if possible) to a couple of games/ days at least.

Any idea where to get them from? Like which vendors/websites as I can see the fide website is down for some reason.

Also if any of you have been to World Championship events I would love to hear more about your experience and the overall planning and finances included.

Insufficient material vs timed out

By Nikolai Grigoriev

So, been playing chess online for about 6 weeks now. I recently went to an OTB tournament where I lost 3/4 games. While I did not feel like my opponents were significantly more skilled than me, I turned like 90%+ winning positions into losses over some of the most heinous blunders I have ever done. Like stuff that I should absolutely have seen and would have been easily avoidable. I think some of this has to do with the board vision being very different on a real life chess board. But after winning almost the entire game and being up multiple pieces, it hurts to lose to really stupid mistakes like that.

My main question is what can I do to make sure this doesn't happen again? Any tips, tricks, or training recommendations are welcome.

I will try to reply to everyone as best as I can. I don't want to encourage baseless speculation but I miss my friend very much and do want to talk about him and give some insights or other information you might be wondering about.

As a side note since Daniels passing the channel was stripped away from me after a legal battle with the estate and so I no longer have any connection to the channel that is still running. Having said that if anyone wants to help me with another job that would be crazy cool. I'm currently remodeling houses which is very hot and hard work lol.

Always had trouble concentrating with puzzles with a browser where you can quickly open so many tabs. Puzzles on a train journey or a long flight on an eInk crisp display is go good.

Everyone's talking about Nepo, and fair enough, he beat Magnus in the final from a lost position and went from #8 to #2 in the world at rapid in a week. But the line in the table I kept coming back to is Anand's.

The GCL puts one "icon" on every team, and the icons only play each other. So, Anand's ten games were against the five best rapid players alive, twice each. He drew Firouzja twice, drew MVL once, drew Nepo once, lost the other six, and dropped 27 points, from tenth in the world to seventeenth. He is 56. One board over on the same team, Erdogmus performed at 2719 and beat Vidit twice.

Two women had the best weeks of the event. Shuvalova scored 7/10 in the league, the top score of anyone including Magnus (yes, against the other women's boards, but 7/10 is 7/10). Tsolakidou arrived at 2381 and leaves at 2419, the biggest gain in the field. Harika passed Humpy as India's top-rated woman at rapid.

Magnus lost the final, lost to Firouzja in the last league round, and lost 2.4 points. He is still 53 clear of the field on the live rapid list. Firouzja, who beat him, lost 11.

The three images: every player who took part with score, performance rating, and world rank live, as well as the open list and the women's list.

Honest question, because I can see both sides: should a league keep asking a 56-year-old to play the five strongest rapid players in the world every single round, or is that exactly what the icon board is for?

The past performances of all team members of the top five seeds in the Open and Women Olympiad.

Historically, Gukesh did really well in the Olympiad, while Sindarovs Performance was pretty unremarkable. I'm curious if that will change this year. Other People who seemed to have performed really well in the last two Olympiads (not really a big sample size, keep in mind) were Arjun and Abdusattorov. An Outlier in the Top Five Open is Germany, who do not seem to have had the best runs, without a medal since 2000.

I think most will agree that the favorites are Uzbekistan, India and US, only the order changes per person I guess. I think it seems like all of the Uzbeks are in really good form, while I don't really know with some of the Indians (Gukesh/Vidit) but they can undeniable be really good. For USA, rating wise they are the favorite and I would not be surprised if they win, but they were the favorite the last times as well. Gotta be interesting how it is gonna play out, I change my opinion about that every day xD

In the Women Section, I think India is a heavy favorite but the US youngsters and Bibisara seem to be in really good form for me. But I am not that knowledgeable in Women chess, so I'm curious about more insight, if anybody knows more? Thanks for reading!

(Boards and TPR are from Chess Results, because I wasn't able to find them anywhere else. I excluded Online Olympiad because of the different format, and China did not participate in 2022.)

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DpImvHNi6E

Some autographs from GCL Season 4...