Why do they say study the endgame first?

A player anywhere near 1400 is not a beginner. Even a player rated 1000 is not a beginner. A beginner would be ranked about 600 to 800.

The first thing a beginner should learn is the endgame of how to mate with K and Q vs a lone K.

Then how to mate with a K and R vs a lone K.

Then maybe how to win an endgame with maybe 3 pawns vs 1 pawn.

Then maybe how to win other simple pawn endgames.

Then maybe how to force a trade to get to one of the above endgames.

After learning the very basic endgames--that is the time to go into other subjects. 

I don't know if I always agree to study the endgame first, but it should be studied very soon after learning a few basic opening principles.

One reason is because it would suck to get into a winning position and then throw it away because you didn't know a simple end-game strategy.

One of the most embarrassing situations is to have a clearly winning position, then get swindled into a stalemate (which is a draw even if it's your opponent in a stalemated position).

New chess players should quickly learn how to get a checkmate from KR vs K, and they should also know that a king and two knights can't force a checkmate (you can only win this if your opponent blunders).

You play a good opening and then win a pawn in the middle game.  One pawn is all you need to win a game.  Exchange down to a K&P vs. K endgame.  Endgame studies help you to learn how to get the pawn to the 8th rank and convert it into a queen to checkmate your opponent.  

Chess is that simple.

Excellent. Thank you for that!

I got to 1400, got stuck and kept losing games in which I had an advantage gained in the opening. Even my tactics rating stagnated and fell. So I quit playing for awhile and got really serious about studying endgame technique. Now I understand the Lucena Position and the Philidor Position in rook endgames and why they are important.  I haven't started playing games again (I want to study more and work on the "drills" found here), but my tactics rating just jumped 150 points. Just understanding concepts like Distant Opposition, I realize, could have turned some games I lost when I had an advantage into wins.

Just scanning a few of the previous posts I am pretty sure your question has been answered.

 

This is very strong advice.  Take the following position from a game I played yesterday in the final round of the Charlottesville Open.

 

(I don't know if others are having trouble with the diagram loading - in case you are, the following is the position:  WKh2, WQd3, WRe2, WRa1, WBd2, WP's b3, c4, g4, h3, BKh8, BQg7, BRg8, BRe6, BBc5, BP's b4, d4, e5, h7)

 

I was Black in this position.  I have an extra pawn island, and my pawns are on the same color as the bishops.  Black is worse here.  However, endgame knowledge has lead to me achieving a winning position.  I end up drawing because I overlooked one item in severe time trouble, but I actually achieved a winning position through knowledge of the endgame.

 

I sacrificed a pawn with 1...e4.  White responds 2.Rxe4.  Now, down a pawn, let's look at the possible endgames:

 

1) King and Pawn endgame - White almost certainly wins

2) Same color Bishop endgame - White almost certainly wins

3) Double Rook endgame - White almost certainly wins

4) Single Rook endgame - Black has some drawing chances, but with all 3 of his pawns scattered, chances are slim.

5) Queen endgame - Pawn quality matters more than pawn quantity.  Black has the farthest advanced passed pawn.  Bingo!  This is the ending Black wants to achieve.  White basically wants anything BUT this scenario.

 

So now I play 2...Bd6+.  After 3.Bf4 (I'd have moved my King if I were White), Black gets rid of 2 of the 3 pieces he wants traded off.  3...Rxe4 4.Qxe4 Bxf4+ 5.Qxf4.  Now Black could care less about the discovery on the Rook.  All that does is let White get the Rook into the game.  Instead, Black harasses the Queen with 5...Rf8, and after his 6.Qd2 (probably not best), I played 6...Qe5+ 7.Kh1 Rf3!  Here White plays 8.Qh6, which means I must cover f8, but otherwise, he has no check with the Queen.  Ra8 is a threat at this point.  So I played 8...Qe4, covering a8 and threatening a deadly discovery.  After 9.Kh2, I play 9...Qe2+ 10.Kh1 Rf1+ - BINGO!  Queen Ending here we come!  After 11.Rxf1 Qxf1+ 12.Kh2, Black could just take a draw here, but Black is actually winning.  After 12...Qf2+ 13.Kh1 d3, White has no check.  He played 14.Qd6, hitting the pawn and trying to check the Black King.  Here is where I screwed up with very little time on the clock.  The winning move here is 14...d2!!.  It looks like Black can't get out of the checks with the ability to check from protected squares like d5 and h5, but Black can wiggle through without White being able to skewer on the f-file, and this is what I missed.  Try it yourself, you can't perpetuate with White.  Black will wiggle though either h4 or f4, depending on how White tries to execute.

 

That said, instead of 14...d2, I had this illusion with very little time left that White had not just d5 and h5, but also cases of skewering if I go on the f-file beyond f7, but it turns out Black can make it so that White can't based on where he must check from previous moves, and I instead played 14...Qf3+?? 15.Kg1 Kg7, but then White checked me, and once I went to g6 with the King, White made the non-checking move that draws, h4!  Locking the Black King out from coming in to hide behind the White pawns and Black Queen, and Black had nothing better than to deliver perpetual check with ...Qg3+ and toggle between the f-, g-, and h-files.  White can never go to e1 with the King because of mate on e2 and White can never interpose on f2 as then Black would have a check with the Queen on h1 and White must interpose on g1, trade Queens, and the White King would be out of the box of the d3-pawn.

 

So knowing your endgames can get you out of a huge mess, and I went from borderline lost to completely winning, but ended up with a draw because of severe time trouble leading to a blunder 14 moves into the execution.

 

Many opening decisions are made bearing the endgame in mind.  Look at any of the many openings that lead to one side having an isolated queen's pawn (it happens in the Queen's Gambit, French Defence, etc.)  One of the main considerations is that the endgames, especially with rooks, are very bad for the owner of the isolated pawn, and this is a huge guide to both sides' middlegame strategy.  The side with the IQP will avoid exchanges and try to win the middlegame with the extra space and center control; the other side will try to exchange, especially minor pieces, and win the endgame.

It is, by the way, quite untrue that you'll never get an endgame you've seen in a book.  For example, all K+P vs K are pretty much the same unless it is a rook's pawn, so study one and you know them all--and they come up all the time.  This one endgame will probably come up dozens of times in your tournament career, either on the board or (more often) in planning.  If you don't know it, it will definitely cost you.  The same is true of R+P vs R.

Last year I dropped my queen (!) to a 1500 player.  Lucky for me he had never studied endgame fortresses, and I got a draw by building a fortress with R+2P vs Q+P--he could never break through.  If I hadn't known that idea it would have been a really expensive loss instead of a mildly expensive draw....

That said, if you want instant payoff, studying tactics will win you more games early on than studying endgames (or openings).  My sense is that this stops being true around 1500-1600 USCF, when your opponents will also probably know tactics fairly well.  By 1900-2000 USCF, not knowing your endgames will really cost you--speaking from bitter experience here.  (I hated endgames as a young player.  I have finally learned to like them, and amazingly enough, have won some--including an even-material endgame against a young master in May.)

Endgames are to chess what putting is to golf.  I don't like golf but the analogy is good. 

 

Who exactly says study endgame first? I say study middlegame first because it's the most important. You don't need to study the begging that much cuz you can just play by the basic opening rules.

capablanca said it, plus it hurts more when you lose in the endgame

Dont remember who said it:

"A mistake in the opening, you can recover from.  A mistake in the middlegame can hurt you.  A mistake in the endgame will kill you"

(p. 9)
Why the Endgame?

Why did I choose the endgame for the subject of this book? Why will it improve
the reader's chess?

The simple answer is that I am convinced a careful study of the endgame sparked
the biggest leap forward in my own game. Can it really be that the endgame is more
important than other phases of the game?
(p. 10)
I would say that it is more a question of balance than of one phase being more
worthy of our study than another. Let us sketch the portrait of a modern player
to illustrate the typical imbalance:

> With the wealth of opening literature, and the ease of access to the latest
grandmaster games on computer databases, it is no great task to build up a high-level
opening repertoire. Time consuming, perhaps, but the path to take is not a difficult
one.

Indeed, I have listened to grandmasters lament the unfairness of this. Gone are
the days when the 'weaker' player can be routinely dispatched in the opening.

> Combined with the knowledge of standard schemes in the middlegame
--linked to their opening repertoire (which is relatively easy to attain, by playing
through master games in the relevant openings)--we have painted the picture of
quite a formidable foe.

All this is perfectly reasonable, and I encourage the reader to spend time doing
exactly these things.

We have, however, a clear motivation here for focusing (at least some) of our
chess energy on the endgame:

> Our opponents will typically have a clear weakness in this area.

> We want to fortify our game with a strong endgame foundation; otherwise
we will be throwing away many good positions (and points!).

Of course, we must expect a certain amount of crossover between the phases of
the game. Knowledge of endgames is useful when studying the openings; often mod-
dern opening theory is so deep that it transposes directly into endgames.

All of this is not new advice; in fact, most players know this already. Why then is
the endgame such a neglected phase of the game?

There is no question it is more difficult to study than, say, the opening. Most
endgame works, typically featuring general rules and many theoretical positions, are
rather too dull to study. By the time we get the theoretical position we memorized,
many years may have passed and we have forgotten the details. Computers often of-
fer little help. I found this every evident when analyzing the opposite-colored bishop
endgame Aronia-Bacrot in 'Endgame Exploration 2'.
(p. 11)
We are all guilty of mimicking the world's strongest players to some degree, and
it is true that they work considerably on openings. The reason is that they are already
proficient in theoretical and technical endgames. Occasionally this is not the case
and, as we do a few times throughout this book, we can enjoy the feeling that we
know something an elite player did not!

Hawkins, Jonathan. 2012. Amateur to IM: Proven Ideas and Training Methods. New Highlands, MA: Mongoose Press.

----------

(p. 2)
In chess--and I immediately became
carried away with it--for the next few years
my father was to be my sole teacher and
opponent.
From the very start he instilled in me a love
for so-called 'simple' positions, with the
participation of only a few pieces. It is they
(p. 3)
that enable an inexperienced player not only
to understand, but also to gain a deep 'feel-
ing' for what each piece is capable of.
Perhaps I rather overrate this factor, but
even so I am inclined to think that it played
an important role in my development as
a chess player.

Smyslov, Vasily. 1983. Smyslov's 125 Selected Games. New York: Cadogan Chess.

----------

(p. 201)
TO GET BETTER, BECOME
LIKE A CHILD

In early November of 1997, I wrote this note to myself:

Today I saw a knight for the first time. I did not
know it could do so much! Actually this all started yes-
terday as I was stunned by the war that a knight could
have against two connected passed pawns. It contin-
ued today when I studied how easily a knight could be
trapped by an opposing king and knight. To think that
such simple mysteries are still present on the chess-
board stuns me. What game have I been playing for
the last seventeen years?

Ashley, Maurice. 2005. Chess for Success. New York: Broadway Books.

 

 

How can you possibly claim you've never needed to use either of these techniques if you don't even know what they are? For all you know, you've lost several R+P vs R endings where knowledge of the Philidor position could've gotten you a draw. And you may have let several winning R + P vs. R positions get away because you weren't aware of the Lucena position. You can't confidently say you've never needed them, because you don't know what you don't know.

"... This book is the first volume in a series of manuals designed for players who are building the foundations of their chess knowledge. The reader will receive the necessary basic knowledge in six areas of the game - tactics, positional play, strategy, the calculation of variations, the opening and the endgame.

... To make the book entertaining and varied, I have mixed up these different areas, ..." - GM Artur Yusupov (2008)

By studying endgame, you will know  that one extra queen in the game or  +9.5 material advantage is totally useless sometimes.  Please check these two diagrams, the value of white queen is zero. Because both are dead draw. 

 

 

Although an extra queen is useless in some conditions, a tempo may be critical in the game, a win/loss from either sides. Check this diagram, whoever move first will lose the game.  Conclusion from these diagrams, a tempo/move may be more important than an extra queen advantage in endgame. 

 

In the opening, if you have an extra queen, you can win even stockfish or Chess God, but in the endgame, if you have extra queen it may still not guarantee to win the game and a tempo/move may be more valuable than a queen. 

Pedagogically, one should go from simple to complex, concrete to abstract, goal to paths.

From simplest concretest goal (checkmate) to complicated abstract meandering (opening)...

Learn to recognize and deliver (avoid) checkmate. (Tactics against the king)

Learn how to force (avoid) a checkmate with a material (dis)advantage. (Won and drawn endgames; drawing tactics)

Learn how to get (avoid) a material (dis)advantage. (Tactics against the non-king)

Learn how to get (avoid) a positional (dis)advantage. (Strategy/positional play; openings)

When the simpler concrete goals and patterns are learned and recognized with facility, it is far easier to understand the why's of the more complicated world of opening theory and middlegame strategy.

I am sure there are benefits to studying endgame early. But I don't need rational reasons - for me endgames are like music by Bach and Handel, like geometry by Euclid - it's an absolute beauty and pleasure.

to me the biggest benefit is you learn how to make a plan and with few pieces on the board it makes it easier to study