Sunday, March 25, 2007
Wild Pawn Races
One of my students had a game with what Silman call "Wild Pawn Races". My student and his opponent both are rated about 1400 on ICC (Internet Chess Club) but "Silman's Complete Endgame Course" covers the winning idea in the Class A 1800-1990 section. Below are two positions. The first one from the book and the second one from my student's game. See if you can find the winning idea.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Chess for the love of it
Today I am starting a chess blog where I will share my thoughts as a coach, player and student of the game. Hopefully the readers of this blog will find something that is interesting, revealing and instructive. One of the things that I love about chess is the many great chess books. So far I have digested 346 pages of the 530 page Silman's Complete Endgame Course. It has been mainly a review and consolidation of what I already knew but I believe it will be a great tool to help me teach my students. In my opinion the book is the best endgame that I have ever read. It does have a couple of flaws. For one there are many typos and Silman's use of opposition without the use of the theory of "Key Squares" will be very confusing for many readers. What is outstanding and revolutionary is how he divided the book by rating groups: Beginners (unrated-999), Class E (1000-1199), Class D (1200-1399), etc all the way up to Master. This gives the student a bite size portion of theory that can easily be digested.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)