Secrets of Chess Endgame Strategy

Lars Bo Hansen

Difficulty: Intermediate, Advanced

Category: Endgame

Readability: 7/10

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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: 7/10

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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.
I love Hansen’s book because of how easy it is to feel like you’re learning. It’s divided into 4 parts: general principles, pawns, minor pieces and major pieces. Unlike other books that focus on rules and principles, Hansen emphasizes how different pieces should be used or exploited. Alongside that, each chapter is accompanied by examples from real games, mostly from classics, and given snippets of brilliancy in the form of short portions of text explaining key principles such as initiative or suppressing counterplay. What I think stands out the most is Hansen’s chapter on pawn structures and how they determine the flow of play and planning in the endgame. All in all, Secrets of Chess Endgame Strategy is a beginner-friendly endgame book which masters could learn a lot from as well, which isn’t a feat many authors can claim.