Endgame Labyrinths by Steffen Nielsen & Jacob Aagaard will be published on September 27th. You can now read an excerpt. To paraphrase the cover text, this book contains 1002 challenging studies that were selected and truncated to be as useful as possible for the practical player. The excerpt gives even more of a flavour of the book.
The content inside the book is excellent, and I am also a fan of the cover, which is by the Canadian artist Jason Mathis. You might already be familiar with Jason’s work from Jacob’s Grandmaster Preparation series.
Having looked at the excerpt I can already tell that most may be too hard for me but it’s definitely looking a contender for another fantastic QC book that I’ll have to buy and try my best with.Managed to solve the one star 531 but even there didn’t even consider 7…Kb2 was an option but officially this didn’t lose me a point ?
Dreading the harder ones….
PS
Is the book Jacob cryptically refers to on p8 Levenfish and Smyslov’s Rook Endgame book? Sosonko claimed Smyslov had minimal input but was quite up front with that if i remember correctly. Or is it another book?
@JB
I don’t think it can be that one. Levenfish was also a famous GM and, as far as I remember, there are not many studies in that book.
“To paraphrase the cover text, this book contains 1002 challenging studies that were selected and truncated to be as useful as possible for the practical player. The excerpt gives even more of a flavour of the book.”
I actually read that too quickly as, “…were selected and traumatized…”
Which I am totally up for. Traumatize me. 🙂
@Steve
There aren’t that many endgame /studies books and with joint authors even rarer…can’t think of anything else after racking my brains. Maybe it was only published in Denmark/ Europe and not in the UK??
@JB
Having a World Champions name on the spine I guess would make sense if you were the publisher at least ?
@JB
I deliberately kept it opaque, because I did not want to hang anyone out, especially as the Western player on the cover is a wonderfully nice person. But also because I only had Mark’s word for it, and never did a personal investigation. It was not meant to criticise anyone, but to place us in a chain of existing work.
It was not the Smyslov/Levenfish book, which indeed only saw Smyslov being a part of it at the final stages, as far as I know. But without him, that book would never have been published at all, so we should not criticise him.
Solved a couple of exercises in the except the past days. Good fun! I like the star system in particular, enabling the student to go at their own pace and increase difficulty gradually.