McCreadyandChess

‘It is a well known phenomenon that the same amateur who can conduct the middle game quite creditably, is usually perfectly helpless in the end game. One of the principal requisites of good chess is the ability to treat both the middle and end game equally well.’  –  Aaron Nimzowitsch

In Ancient Rome the legal concept ‘negligence’ was principally defined in two ways; ‘dolus’ for intentional damage, and ‘culpa’ for unintentional damage. In modern day Italy, Ivanchuk recently diplayed ‘dolus’ in Reggio Emilia, after self-destructing and giving away his queen, a rook and a bishop in consecutive moves, but how about ‘culpa’ in chess terms. Have you given the endgame the attention it deserves? Do you shy away from it, perhaps believing that games should be won and lost in the middlegame, or does its labyrinthine interrelation of general principles, nuances, finesses, and exceptions put you off? We all lose games in the endgame but in what sense are we culpable?

If you play for more than pleasure, you will to some degree, reflect upon the nature of defeat and why you encounter it. Of course, most of us have, at the very least, an acute awareness of what we do and don’t do well, but progress in chess is more demanding. Chess forces us to understand our strengths and weaknesses and explore their nature. This is true of all phases of the game, the endgame is no exception. Players -myself included- who do not attend to their own poor endgame play are like footballers carrying a niggle or nursing an injury, choosing to soldier instead of treating the problem instead. Even greats such Kasparov missed numerous wins and amassed a collection of questionable moves in the endgame. In his ‘How Life imitates Chess’  he points out that in some of his games he missed ‘a series of draws and wins, as did some of my opponents’. He wasn’t the only world champion to have known weaknesses in the endgame either. Fischer was known to be susceptible amongst his peers in certain positions, inadventently losing drawn positions almost throughout his career. What does all this mean for a mere club player? Isn’t weakness in the endgame nothing more than a forgiveable truth of chess? Not really: if you neglect the endgame, you will have weaknesses in your game, however, the purpose of this post is to try and readress the positives that endgame study can give by listing some of the benefits rather than dwelling on the doom and gloom of dystopian elements in endgame play. Lastly, I do not intend to become distracted by precise definitions over the endgame itself. Though there are phases of a game where it is unclear whether a transition between the middle & endgame has occurred, these are peripheral matters that uneducated Grandmasters like to quibble over in order to look clever. The core of endgame theory is uncontentious, that is the focus of this post.

1) An obvious advantage that studying the endgame offers is the increased length in calculation skills. Given that kings and pawns can only move one square at a time, calculations of 10 moves plus are not uncommon in the endgame. Since miscalculation often has catastrophic consequences in this phase of the game, such as your opponent’s pawn queening ahead of yours, work on the endgame improves calculation skills by its very nature alone. Regular studies and exercises should increase the overall ply in your calculations. This doesn’t mean that you will calculate with greater accuracy but it does mean your capacity to calculate further ahead will be increased.

2) Another important benefit that the endgame offers as that it shows you how to maximize the pieces. With so little on the board, what a piece can or can’t do becomes more defined. We can develop a greater understanding of how bishops can suffer or triumph over colour-complexes or how knights can use tempi to deliver checkmate, or see how a queen can be over-powered by two rooks. During the opening or middlegame pieces usually work in conjunction with one another. This happens in the endgame too, but their roles are more clearly defined and the freedom that the pieces have is much greater. Understanding such points can improve deployment of the pieces. This can be particularly useful when approaching the endgame as you will have a better sense of where to put the pieces in preparation for it.

3) The endgame improves your learning skills. By this I mean that the endgame teaches you when to adhere to and disregard ‘rules’; it parallels the necessity of both learning and unlearning more sharply than other phases of the game. Common (mis) conceptions are challenged and exposed readily in the endgame. Endgames which are commonly thought of as drawn, such as bishop of opposite colours, quickly become subject to a hierarchy of considerations, from which predicted outcomes can then, and only then, be made. Considerations such as material balance, space advantage, the relative position of the kings and pieces, or the nature of the pawns on the board, and so on. The endgame, then, requires a very active learning process. relying on cliches or vague principles about certain types of endgames won’t get you very far if you don’t have the skills required to play with accuracy, unlearning them often does.

4) Clock management. In theory, your clock management should improve for two reasons. Firstly, you should need less time in the endgame itself as you will have a better idea of what to do, and secondly, you will have a clearer idea of how much time you will need in the endgame prior to entering it. This second point should mean that from a middlegame assessment, you will be less inclined to slip into time trouble knowing how much work ahead of you is still needed. Whether this occurs in practice is a different matter but sound assessment of the type of endgame you are facing should enable you to establish the amount of time you need to play well in it.

5) Confidence. To some degree chess, like football, is a confidence game. When facing grave uncertainties and complications, we are more likely to retreat and play passively if low on confidence, and vice-versa if we are not. Improved endgame play should increase your confidence at the board, because you will have a better understanding of when and where to fight your opponent during the game, thus possessing a broader scope for victory then you previously had.

So there you have it, five good reasons to invest more time in the endgame. I would like to end with an important caveat. Be careful about using older endgame manuals. The analysis can be unsound and doesn’t compare the computer-assisted literature available today. Even greats such as Capablanca were guilty of flawed analysis, other greats, Keres and Fine immediately come to mind, produced literature awash with poor analysis. Since the advent of digitalization, endgame analysis has become far more concrete and reliable. Dvoretsky is testimony to that and a good starting point for anyone.

‘It is hardly useful if you trustingly play through variation after variation from a book. It is a great deal more useful and more interesting if you take part actively in the analysis, find something yourself, and try to refute some of the author’s conclusions.’  –  Mark Dvoretsky