Chess book review, Endgame Strategy, Mikhail Shereshevsky
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Endgame Strategy

Mikhail Shereshevsky

Difficulty: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced

Category: Endgame

Readability: 5/10

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How difficult it is to read the book without using a board. A book with 10/10 readability is a bedtime story, a book with 1/10 is a puzzle book full of variations. Readability doesn’t represent the quality of the book.

Usefulness: 9/10

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Usefulness is a measure of how useful the book is for chess improvement within the topic it covers. Books with a high usefulness score should help you improve quicker than those with a low score.
Instead of going over theoretical endgames and endless variations, the Endgame Strategy focuses on essential endgame principles, patterns, and ideas one must master in order to navigate complex endgames, regardless of the pieces involved. I can’t think of a book that has helped me win more points and half-points in over the board classical games.
  • 2022
  • Mikhail Shereshevsky
  • Pages: 368
  • Physical, Electronic

There aren’t many books that are considered essential for every improving player. Shereshevsky’s Endgame Strategy is one of them. A book considered by most strong players and coaches a classic every chess player must read more than once.

Instead of going over theoretical endgames and endless variations, the book focuses on essential endgame principles, patterns, and ideas one must master in order to navigate complex endgames, regardless of the pieces involved. What Shereshevsky teaches may seem simple to those of you who are 2000 FIDE and above, but I assure you that there are a few things you could learn from the book.

I remember a tournament game I played in 2018, in which the chapter on the initiative in the endgame helped me convert a slightly better position. Luckily for me, I had gone over the book a month before the tournament, so Shereshevsky’s analysis of Spassky-Gheorghiu from Siegen 1970 popped into my head as soon as I noticed similar patterns on the board.

There were many editions of this classic endgame textbook, some of them published 50 years ago. The new, revised and expanded edition published by New in Chess in 2022, features many modern examples from recent Grandmaster play, and their analysis applies the same principles Shereshevsky used when he wrote the first edition. I own an old copy from the 80s as well, and I have to say that I find the new edition just as useful when it comes to mastering the ideas Shereshevsky was trying to teach, with the addition of the extra games and material, which make it superior by a large margin.

Endgame Strategy is divided into 15 chapters, each focusing on an essential endgame principle applicable in almost any complex endgame, such as “Centralizing the King”, “The principle of two Weaknesses”, “Between assessment and calculation” (which I found particularly useful), and “Do not hurry”, a rule every Russian chess player must have heard their coach say countless times.

If you could only get one book that would help you improve endgame play rapidly, this should be the one. I really can’t think of a book that has helped me win more points and half-points in over the board classical games.

It’s available in physical book and as an e-book, and, as I’ve said before, there are countless editions, so you might be as lucky as I was and find a cheap copy in your local antique book store.