Understanding Chess Endgames | One Pawn Only

This course will help you understand what to do in a one-pawn endgame.

Learn and Master Chess Endgame (One Pawn Only for now) with a Successful Grandmaster

• Learn how to promote a pawn

• Study how to properly stop the passed pawn

• Use your king to support the pawn promotion

• Understand the principle of opposition

• Learn about the distant opposition

• Automate your knowledge and pass this knowledge to your muscle memory

• Discover a funny position that the best chess engine of our time (Stockfish) does not understand

This course will lay the strong foundation for the fascinating world of chess endgames

The course is for beginner/club-level chess players.

Here, you will learn, understand, internalize, and automate your knowledge and your reflexes in a one-pawn endgame.

"Why do I need to do that?" one might ask. My answer would be as follows.

Let us imagine that you have an extra pawn in an endgame. Imagine you and your opponent both have a queen, or a rook, or a bishop, or a knight. Both players have to know what is going to happen after the exchange. Most of the time, one of the sides is avoiding an exchange (usually, that is the weaker one). You need to know exactly whether you should exchange that last piece or not! How do you know that? Well, you evaluate the resulting one-pawn endgame! How do you do that? You study this course, and you understand it so deeply that it takes you several seconds to evaluate the final position. If you have to spend time analyzing one-pawn endgame at the end of every line, then you will simply run out of time!

It is quite possible that you already know all the information from this course. That is not enough! Let me draw a parallel with mathematics. It is not enough to just know how to multiply and divide natural numbers. In a chess game, like in a mathematical exam, you need to do it quickly so that you can solve more complex problems! In mathematics, the task could be figuring out whether the number is prime, or figuring out the greatest common denominator of two numbers. In chess, a more complex problem could be an endgame with more pawns than one, or an endgame with other pieces that could be exchanged by force. If you understand and know exactly the evaluation and the best play when there is one pawn on the board, then the more complex puzzles will be easier for you.

The course consists of 8 sections

Section 1 | Introduction: You will learn what this course is all about. There you will also find my position on the russian war against Ukraine.

Section 2 | Pawn against the King: You will find three short videos about the race between the pawn and the King trying to stop it. You will learn the rule of a square and how to use it properly.

Section 3 | The King is shouldering another King: Both Kings are on the same side from the pawn. You will find examples of how your King can help your pawn by shouldering its counterpart.

Section 4 | The King helps from the side: The Kings are on the opposite sides of the pawn. You will learn how to promote your pawn then.

Section 5 | The Opponent's King is directly in front of the Pawn: You will learn how to stop the passed pawn with the King.

Section 6 | Opposition: You will learn what an opposition is, what it means to win or to lose the opposition, and why. You will discover the ley squares for each passed pawn. You will learn what a distant opposition is. And you will learn the value of an extra pawn move in an endgame.

Section 7 | Stopping the a-Pawn (and the h-Pawn): You will learn everything you need to know about stopping and promoting the a-Pawn (and, of course, the h-pawn via symmetry). You will also find out about a funny position that the most powerful chess engines of our time (like Stockfish) do not understand at all!

Section 8 | Conclusion: You will hear the summary of the course and the importance of internalizing this knowledge and automating it. In the attachment, you will find a link to the free lichess study where you can check all the positions discussed in the course.

Who this course is for:

- Beginner/hobby chess players who want to understand chess endgames better

- Chess enthusiasts who are ready to build a foundation for their endgame play

- Anyone who is interested in improving their endgame play

- Chess players who want to evaluate one pawn endgame in a matter of seconds