Chess Strategy

Stalemate can be valuable rescue motif in seemingly hopeless ending. Bellow is a sample from the book “Da Te Pitam?” by IM Nikola Karaklajic. Unfortunately, this wonderful endgame collection composed of 52 tests never saw its English edition, but it was translated to French, and Russian teachers massively used Serbian version. The book was real hit in Arab world.

White to move and make a draw. Note that straightforward trade of Rook for the f-pawn will not save the game, because black King will win e4 pawn and then he takes the opposition thanks to the tempo from doubled pawn.

Try to find the right path, I will post the solution in 2-3 days.

After the intense work with Baku Grand Prix coverage, I decided to reward myself with a good chess book and ordered Glenn Flear’s “Practical Endgame Play - Beyond the Basics”. It should be fun to go over 544 pages of endings with two pieces and pawns for each side. At the same time, I always look for the candidate books that I could buy on next turn, after those endings saturate me.

One title, “True Lies in Chess” by GM Lluís Comas Fabregó, immediately caught my attention. At first I thought this is another book about Fischer, Kasparov, Soviets, KGB or some other controversial subject that people use when they want to earn quick buck. So I wanted to see what is this all about and the first stop was website of Quality Chess, who published this work.

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