A
book with quite a good page-to-price ratio is
639 Essential
Endgame Positions by
Eric Schiller, which is probably too long for
its purpose. Since the book is primarily for the
less-advanced player, Schiller rightly uses a
lot of prose, including a 9-page general introduction
and numerous explanations of positions. I think
this will please many readers, who tend to be
alienated by too many moves (Flear's endgame book
also has this good feature, as did Soltis' and
Robertie's). One cute early example arises when
Schiller is explaining opposition, saying that
it is "like two Sumo wrestlers, trying to
get the enemy to move aside." Nevertheless,
he does include one poor example of opposition,
which neglects an opportunity for diagonal opposition.
I simply haven't looked at many
examples from this book. The ones I did examine
were fine; I think that computer checking supplemented
both the players' and author's analysis. The prose
is sometimes a bit awkward, but comprehensible;
and Schiller avoids the kind of mistakes I have
mentioned before in my reviews, indicating that
Cardoza proofreading has improved greatly since
that time. Oh yes, there is the obligatory, but
milder-than-usual claim: "This book is intended
to help you achieve greater practical results...You
can't learn all of endgame theory from a reference
book." That's a pretty fair comment, but
I had to include it for consistency's sake.
An interesting point Schiller makes
is that a lot of these fairly elementary grandmaster
mistakes we see in all these books are due to
time-trouble (look at the move numbers), and that
specific endgame knowledge is more important in
these times of faster time controls. I found it
amusing that he makes several comments about how
studying compositions doesn't help much, when
his earlier book (reviewed below) consists only
of compositions! But from what I see of this book,
it has lots of good and reasonably simple examples.
A novice or developing player could learn the
basics in great detail, and something more by
judicious thumbing through the rest of the book.
YOU
CAN FIND THIS BOOK AT
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