Mednis: Practical Bishop Endings

Autor: Mednis, Edmar
Verlag: Chess Enterprises
Erscheinungsjahr: 1990
Sprache: Englisch
Buchumschlag: paperback
Seiten: 134

Edmar Mednis shares his brilliance in chess; practical bishop endings

Preeminent endgame specialist and author Grandmaster Edmar Mednis presents a concise guide to proper play in bishop endings. Correct play with a bishop requires more precise knowledge than rook or queen, and many players fail to appreciate the subtleties involved. Mednis follows the pattern set in his bestselling Practical Rook Endings to provide a useful and understandable guide to how to get the most from bishop, pawn, and king endings. This book is a must for players of all strengths.

As a result of my training and teaching work I have learned that less experienced players tend to greatly underrate the Bishop. It apparently seems such a simple piece as it just moves back and forth along a diagonal. Compare this to the tricky Knight which always lands on a square different in color from where it came from and is capable of the nastiest Knight forks! As a matter of fact, many "amateurs" tend to jump at any chance to exchange off a Bishop for a Knight. Yet more experienced players realize the inherent powers of a Bishop. However, to properly handle a Bishop a much more sophistiunderstanding is required than for the Knight. This is particularly true for pure Bishop endgames.
For quite some time I have been wanting to write a treatise on Bishop endgames so that I could present the princlearly enough to enable everyone to significantly improve their play of such endings. Recently David McKay Co. allowed my first endgame book, Practical Endgame Lesto go out of print. For about ten years it was "the" book which dealt with understanding the whole field of endgame play. The fact that the material in this book again became available to me was the impetus for doing Practical Bishop Endings now. Of course, everything has been substantially redone to make it clearer and better. Other sources have been my endgame writings, mostly from my syndicated column The Practical Endgame, as well as fresh material from my extensive files. As appropriate, direct credit is given in the text. Of course, any errors remain my responsibility. I would appreciate your calling them to my attention.
The book consists of two parts: pure same color Bishop endings and pure opposite color Bishop endings. The very last chapter summarizes all the previous chapters and compares same color Bishop endgames to opposite color Bishop endgames. The objective of this book is the same as for Practical Rook Endings: to present material sufficiently clearly so that the reader will have at least 95% of the knowledge required to play such endgames successfully.

134 Seiten, kartoniert, 1. Ausgabe, 1990