Endgame Books for study

Can anyone give me a few good options for endgame books? I feel like I am especially poor in the late stages where calculation is more important than general ideas (ie turn 40 of this game where I probably had winning chances http://www.chess.com/echess/game.html?id=30592155). How do I become more proficient in these situations?

In that game, 41.Kf3 a move earlier looks like it would have stopped your opponent's h-pawn before it had a chance to get rolling.  Your united passed pawn duo on the other hand is much easier to defend especially with your bishop's help.

Endgames tend to be less calculation-intensive than middlegames, but when it comes to a race to queen your pawns, it's important to calculate it all out.  Keeping a record of your tree of variations might help.  Paul Keres' Practical Chess Endings is a useful survey of some general principles, but if you want to improve your calculation skills, probably the best way is to practice, and analyze specific positions from your games.

Dvoretzky, Panov, Shereshevsky, Portisch

Hi there,

That endgame seems quite difficult. His bishop is pretty well placed to shepherd the pawn home. Maybe 41.Kf3 offered some chances, stopping the advance of his pawn. After 41...Kd5 42.Be3 Black has to find a move.

One idea for White is to play b6 and then play for the exchange of bishops (while attacking h4) with Bf2.

The thing with endings is that although they very much require accurate calculation, it's the general ideas that help guide the direction of your calculation. In other words, you know what you're aiming for, then you calculate the various possibilities for getting there.

Most of my endgame knowledge I derived from Fine's Basic Chess Endings.

Silman's Complete Endgame Course: From Beginner to Master is excellent and well organized to be appreciated by players of all levels.  (You just read/study up to your level, or maybe slightly beyond.)  Very practical.

I dont have any books by Portisch , are they good and how many has he written ?

Anyone know where I can find (without paying :p) a list of corrections to Fine?

Seems like you can't. I got curious about this too (to see what kind of mistakes would a GM make), and google told me that list was written by Larry Evans in a 2004 issue of chess life magazine.

i really need help finding the right the right endgame book

The standard to measure against is Yuri Averbakh"s "Chess Endings-Essential Knowledge".

Reb, I'd never heard of the Portisch book either, but apparently it's called Six Hundred Endings, and was released by Cadogan/Pergamon in 1981.  There is also a Selected Games of Lajos Portisch from Arco released in 1979.

I like Van Perlo's Endgame Tactics (besides Silman's book). Portisch's 600 Endgames along with the two volume set by Shereshevky are also quite good. RC Griffiths has a good book called The Endings which I read years ago and helped me. There are plenty of good endgame books out there--the key is to actually read them.

Do you have problems with the calculation or the concepts?  It's probably more likely that you know the concepts but find new situations where they don't apply or don't apply as well.  Now, I'm not a great player, but I believe that the best study of endgames is playing endgames.  Learn from your mistakes and go from there (or you can be like me and freak out about an endgame position, set it up on your own chess board, and analyze it for hours until you figure part of it out).

John Nunn has a new book out called Understanding Chess Endgames which covers 100 key endgame concepts with lots of examples and prose explanation.  It is recommended for players 1600-2200.

As a beginner,i found Silman's Complete Endgame Course book very useful

find more about here: http://www.jeremysilman.com/book_reviews_js/Silmans_Complete_Endgame_Course.html

I second this one.  It starts with absolute beginner basics and works up through some pretty advanced stuff.