Back To The Drudgery Of Endgame

Once more guys, this time with a feeling.

Yes, I'm back to training elementary endgames, once again. When I stopped doing tactics, the idea was to focus on endgames. But as usual, it didn't last very long, and in the end my endgame training has been sporadic at best. I certainly have done much more tactics than endgames during the last year, which isn't that much either.

So a while ago I got into it again. I started from the first Karsten Müller DVD, and went systematically through all the examples. I also trained many of them against fritz, to get it all down cold, and quick enough for blitz. I'm hoping it'll help my games, as I lose a fair portion of my blitz games from a 'won' position in the endgame. I simply lack the technique, and succumb to either braindead blunders or use too much time.

One big surprise found already: It turns out my lone queen endings were crap. I actually had big problems at winning against nasty 1P cases. But thanks to Müller and the help of assistant coach Mr.Fritz, I can now win all winnable Q vs. 1P endings. Although the rook and bishop pawn cases are still a bit hazy as Fritz adamantly refuses to play the best defense and drops the pawn the as soon as getting mated by the queen becomes the longer sequence. Another good example of the stupidity of engines. They're just oblivious to the fact that the few last tricky moves against bishop pawn are far more difficult for a human than the 10-15 move elementary mate with queen. -I guess I should train defending those endings against fritz, and that way get to the core of the best defense. There are some surprisingly difficult cases depending on where on the 'winning zone' the attacking king is.

That'll have to wait for the next iteration though, as I already moved to DVD 2 and rook endings. Which is sort of new territory for me, as although I have scratched them before, I'm really not even close to having even the simplest cases down cold.

So now I'm planning to put the positions into a file, and hopefully learn how to load them into the fritz endgame training module. That way drilling those positions would become extremely practical, especially when I'll no doubt have the need to re-learn all of it from time to time. As the KNB incident has pointed out.