How You Can Win By Becoming An Endgame Expert

I’ve repeatedly seen less experienced players mishandle easily winning endgames or lose drawn endgames. Often, these errors stem from miscalculations or tactical oversights, which are not necessarily a lack of understanding about endgames but rather insufficient tactical awareness. To solve this you simply need to work on your tactics.

However, many games are lost due to a fundamental lack of knowledge about endgame concepts. This is especially true for amateurs who started learning chess online without a coach or any proper guidance. They’ve trained tactics, played a lot of games and studied openings (perhaps a bit too much).

Studying endgames is often seen as "boring," and while that might hold some truth, the great news is that there’s not much you need to learn. For pawn endgames, I’ve created a lichess study where you can master all necessary concepts in fewer than 40 exercises.

My point is that you can quickly learn all essential endgame principles and likely boost your Elo by 100+ points. Additionally, once you’ve mastered the art of endgames, there’s a very interesting thing you can do that I learnt from one of the best coaches in the world.
What he told me was that I could:

“master the endgame like Magnus Carlsen or Capablanca and then exchange the queens off early.”

This might seem like a boring way to play with most games having to end in a draw, but that’s not actually the case! A couple of months ago I played a tournament where I exchanged the queen's in the opening in four of the games and I took 3.5 points in those games.

Examples of opening where you go straight to the endgame:

With the White Pieces

The Breyer Variation against the Caro-Kann

I love playing against the caro-kann and this is one of my favorite lines. White is arguing that black’s c6 pawn makes their development rather awkward and can lead to dark-square weaknesses if black ever goes a7-a5.

My Favorite Opening: The Catalan

There’s a couple variations where you exchange the queen’s early, but these two are some of my favorites:

The Reverse Grünfeld

I like to play different move orders that reach the catalan, sometimes with 1. Nf3. This can lead to a reverse grünfeld where we swap the queens straight out of the opening:

With the Black Pieces

d7-d6 Followed By e7-e5 Stuff

This is really the quickest way to offer a queen exchange as black.

The Infamous Berlin Endgame

This is what super GMs love to play and I’m sure you’ve seen it.

The 1. d4 Berlin

I attended a training session with Magnus while in norway who mentioned this opening variation as the “1. d4 berlin”. It derives from the semi-tarrasch:

You can train these openings and endgames against Noctie, which is an AI tool that can guess your rating and adapt to your strength. There's also a lot of cool features I recommend you check out.

Link: Noctie AI

They've helped me financially in my journey to world championship and if you're interested in buying their premium version, you can use my discount code ZIGZAG