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Reviews
Endgame Challenge
Reviewed by
Bill Whited
9/1/02
Endgame Challenge, by John Nunn (Gambit, 2002).
 Endgame
studies have always terrified me. This is because I may be among the world’s
worst endgame players and I have the game scores to prove it. My inability
to play endgames has had me hopelessly mired as a low ranking “A” player for
years and the situation hasn’t improved much, despite having two bookshelves
lined with books on how to play the endings.
When the editor assigned me the task of reviewing John Nunn’s Endgame
Challenge, I eagerly anticipated the task with the same amount of
enthusiasm that I normally reserve for root canals. Imagine my surprise when
I discovered that the esteemed Dr. Nunn has actually come up with a way to
help me learn to play endings better and enjoy it at the same time! The
number of great chess writers is fairly small. The number of great chess
writers who can write for both the intermediate and the advanced player is
even smaller. Those who can do so in the same book can be counted on one
hand with fingers to spare, but John Nunn is one of them.
Some definitions are in order here first. Endgame studies are not “chess
problems”, although they are closely related. Chess problems suffer from a
certain degree of artificiality, which is why a lot of over-the-board chess
players don’t care for them much, since they don’t often reflect real-life
game situations. Endgame studies, on the other hand, are usually inspired by
real endings but have one and only one solution, and are designed to be
highly instructive. The goal of an endgame study is to produce either a win
or draw, and they usually represent a simplified version of a real endgame.
Unlike mating themes or tactical problems, endings often require deep
concrete analysis over pattern recognition. Well-designed endgame studies
help a player sharpen his analytical skills as well as reinforce endgame
principles. While you certainly can do this by studying real endings,
studies have the advantage of eliminating all of the alternate solutions so
that you can concentrate on solving the study while learning the underlying
principles at the same time.
Nunn spent over a year collecting endgame studies and then reducing the
number of them from over 20,000, down to the 250 best and most instructive
ones. Using Deep Fritz on a dual processor microcomputer, along with the
Nalimov tablebases, he carefully checked thousands of studies and found
errors in more than one thousand of them. This is a testament to the
difficulty of endgame play rather than the human fallibility of the
composers, and to the enduring richness of chess. The 250 endgame studies
that remain are the cream of the crop – challenging and instructive. With
such a complex subject matter, it would be easy to leave most players below
the master level scratching their heads, but Nunn’s analysis and detailed
explanations make this a highly readable and understandable book. While I
certainly found the problems to be very challenging, playing over the
solutions taught me a lot about the endgame, and it was actually pretty
painless - especially compared to the average root canal!
While the primary target audience for this book is the advanced club player,
Nunn’s skill at explaining the solutions make the book quite instructive for
lower rated players (working with a good endgame tutorial, like
Pandolofini’s Endgame Course or Edmar Mednis’s Practical Endgame
Lessons in conjunction with Endgame Challenge would be very
helpful for these readers), while his detailed analysis will make it useful
and entertaining to even the IM or GM.
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