Weak endgame skills

Title pretty much says it all. I've got a decent opening repertoire, and my middlegame play isn't bad (could use improvement, but I'm getting there), but I haven't seen any improvement in my endgame skills since I started playing. So, my question is, what are some good ways I can improve my endgame play?

Ultimately you're looking to memorise six piece endgame tables. That's how all the best players do it. Look them up online, and then load them into Fritz. They're a few gigabytes in size, but if you take your time you'll be able to learn all the moves in time.

So basically my goal is to memorize as much as humanly possible and then, when I'm playing, simplify anything more complicated down to a combination I have memorized?

Yes.

Cruel.

There are some great endgame books out there that should help alot.  I have Silman's Complete Endgame Course and have found it to be an invaluable boost to my game.  Pandolfini's is supposed to be quite good too but I can't speak to it.  I'm far more comfortable now simplifying down to an endgame with a minimal advantage because I know I can convert them and I don't think any other single factor has helped my game more than working on my endgame.

I agree that has to be a very boring and time consuming way of studying..

Not to mention impossible to accomplish.

Okay, thank you, that's kind of what I was hoping to hear. "Memorize f---ing everything" sounded a little sadomasochistic to me. I'll take a look at the books you recommended; I think I've seen the titles at the bookstore before.

Can I add an old but very good book by the great Paul Keres, that helped me a lot at the time - Practical Chess Endings.

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Chess-Endings-Paul-Keres/dp/0890580286

Thanks!

Heh actually, even memorizing all 3 piece tablebases is humanly impossible... Also unnecessary. shortest wins and exact lines in these sorts of positions don't interestest humans... And humans don't think that way and don't need to think that way anyway.

Just work on basic endgames (K+P vs. K, K+2P vs K+P, K+2P vs. K+2P, K+2B vs. K etc.), look at different endgame techniques and ideas (opposition, zugzwang, breakthrough etc.).

As to middlegame, don't kid yourself. Even slightly above 2000 level, going through a heavy tactical and strategic analysis of my games, the middlegame is full of errors. At 1300, each and every one of your games should be filled with plenty of these middlegame errors, and it will remain a very important part of the game to study for quite a bit for time (probably the most important for a few hundred points more, as you'll see you AND ALL your opponents at this level can be made to just lose the game at this stage(midddlegame), making the endgame a lot less important.

Sorry, I didn't mean to come off arrogant when I mentioned my middlegame. I'm not professing to be a Kasparov; I just meant that my middlegames aren't so atrociously horrible as to induce vomitting. (Okay, a few of them are, but not all of them.) I recognize that I have a lot to learn. I look over my games all the time and I try to recognize recurring themes (both mistakes and good moves) so that I don't fall for the same errors again and I can capitalize on good moves that I recognize. From what I'm hearing, it seems this kind of study, applied to my own games and games of players far wiser than I, will be one of my most important resources.

Sorry, I didn't mean to come off arrogant when I mentioned my middlegame. I'm not professing to be a Kasparov; I just meant that my middlegames aren't so atrociously horrible as to induce vomitting. (Okay, a few of them are, but not all of them.) I recognize that I have a lot to learn. I look over my games all the time and I try to recognize recurring themes (both mistakes and good moves) so that I don't fall for the same errors again and I can capitalize on good moves that I recognize. From what I'm hearing, it seems this kind of study, applied to my own games and games of players far wiser than I, will be one of my most important resources.

Thanks for the advice- and, again, sorry if my original post sounded arrogant in any way.

No it didn't sound arrogant at all. Just sounded a bit like you're misleading yourself. So I wanted to make sure.

Btw, I'm 100% sure even your description of your middlegames is not accurate, and that if you check your middlegames and analyze them thoroughly with the help of stronger players, you'll find huge (and most of the time game losing) blunders in each and every game, with almost no exceptions.

It's not because I think something bad of your game... Just that it's true for most of my games too:) Even at the 2000 level, it's still the case. No need to mention the likes of kasparov:).

Middlegame is simply most important until you can usually play a game without such blunders (usually. making such a mistake from time to time will happen...).

As to endgames, until you have mastered the (almost) blunderless middlegame (no need for the (usually) spectacular middlegame...That's a whole other level), just stick with the most basic endgames.

Hope this helps.

Read "Endgame Strategy" by Mikhail Shereshevsky. It's served me well : )