22 December 2006

Shereshevsky's 'Mastering the Endgame: Closed Games'

Via eBay I was lucky to get a copy of Shereshevsky's 'Mastering the Endgame, Volume 2: Closed Games' (Cadogan 1992) for a reasonable price. This is the sequel to 'Mastering the Endgame: Open and Semi-Open Games'.

The introduction to the book, co-authored with Slutsky, says, 'In games begun with the open and semi-open openings, the endgame for a long time retains its individuality; thus one does not confuse a Sicilian endgame with a Ruy Lopez, or a Caro-Kann endgame with one from Petroff's Defence. In the closed openings things are more complicated. In many of them identical Pawn structures arise and, for example, openings so dissimilar in spirit as the Queen's Gambit and the Gruenfeld Defence can lead to analogous endings.'

The book has only four chapters: Dark-Square Strategy, Light-Square Strategy, Symmetry, and Asymmetry. Dark-square strategy means games where Black has played ...g6, like the King's Indian and Benoni. Light-square strategy means games without ...g6 and usually without ...d5, many of them with ...b6. This was new terminology for me.

A translator's note mentions, 'To reduce the original manuscript to a manageable size for publication, several games have had to be omitted'. I have no idea how many. Since my first task on a new book is to find or create a PGN file, I should discover how many games are missing.

1 comment:

maven said...

Mark, did you manage to get the pgn for "Mastering the Endgame: Closed Games" book? I am looking for the pgn for sometime now... If you managed to find it, is it possible to share it?