Decision-Making in Major Piece Endgames

Description

♟️ What will you learn from this book?

Rook and queen endgames are both the most frequent and the most difficult to manage in competitive chess. Unlike minor piece endgames, where principles are clearer, major piece endgames require a constant balance between concrete calculation, positional evaluation and technical intuition. Even players rated over 2700 commit serious errors in these positions — and that’s not anecdotal: it’s structural. Rook and queen endgames are intrinsically complex because the number of possible positions is enormous and the differences between winning, drawing and losing are often microscopic.

In this book, Boris Gelfand shares his real thought process in rook and queen endgames. Not just which moves are correct, but how he arrived at them, when he calculated and when he relied on evaluation, and where he came close to going wrong. It’s the inside view of the decision-making process of a player who has competed at the highest level for over 30 years, including the 2012 World Championship Final against Vishy Anand.

🎯 Who is this book for?

• Advanced players: master candidates, masters and grandmasters
• Coaches who want to understand how a world-elite player thinks in order to transmit it to their students
• Serious players who already know basic endgame theory and want to make the leap to deep understanding of complex positions

📖 Contents

The book is structured into 14 chapters plus an appendix, with player index, game index, exercise index and solutions, and bibliography:

1. The importance of analysis
2. Don’t rush
3. Three surprisingly complicated rook endgames
4. Two defensive methods in rook endgames
5. From simple to complex
6. Diving to the bottom of the sea
7. Mamedyarov
8. Grischuk
9. Queen and pawn endgames with «a», «g» or «h» pawns
10. Several queens
11. Full cycle
12. Materialising the advantage in the Fourth Phase
13. The fruits of hard work
14. Twelve rook exercises

One of the book’s most original concepts is the Fourth Phase of chess: the intermediate phase between the middlegame and the technical endgame, where decisions are especially difficult because the position is neither clearly tactical nor clearly technical. Gelfand develops this concept with examples from his own competitive practice.

📚 The Gelfand-Aagaard series

This is the fourth instalment of a series that has redefined how to write about decision-making in chess. Gelfand doesn’t just explain what is correct — he explains how he reasoned at the board, including his doubts, his evaluation errors and the moments when intuition was more reliable than calculation. The three previous volumes in Spanish are Decision-Making in Positional Chess, Decision-Making in Dynamic Chess and Technical Decision-Making in Chess. This fourth volume can be read independently, though understanding is greater with the previous ones.

👤 About the authors

Boris Gelfand (born 1968 in Minsk) is an Israeli Grandmaster. 2012 World Championship finalist against Vishy Anand, World Cup winner and 2011 Candidates Tournament winner. Jacob Aagaard is a Danish Grandmaster and the only chess author to have won all the major chess writing awards in the world. Translated into Spanish by Alfonso Romero Holmes, Spanish Grandmaster and director of publisher Chessy.

♟️ Why we recommend it at Chesscul

At Chesscul we recommend this book to advanced students who already master basic endgame theory and want to understand how to think in complex rook and queen positions. The difference between this book and a conventional endgame manual is that Gelfand shows the process, not just the result.

🔗 Recommended companions

• Rook Endgames: Everything You Need to Know: GM Andrea Stella’s foundational rook ending theory — essential grounding before this book.
• 100 Endgames You Must Know: the most complete endgame theory manual in Spanish.
• Technique for the Tournament Player: Dvoretsky and Yusupov approach endgame technique with the same analytical rigour but in a more didactic format.