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Endgames

Hello goodnight to all.

I'm a completely beginner at chess, I've been playing for at least five months, and I am not improve at all, I know that I started to play too late with 23 years old, and I'm not expecting to be a professional chess player, I just want to play without make a lot of mistakes and blunders, in the middle game and in the opening I have no problems at all, but in the end game it's a nightmare.

I've been solving puzzles, tactics, but I'm not seeing any results I keep losing to strong opponents in the endgame because I've no idea how to play perfectly. So the question is: How do I have to do?
Obvious answer: work on endgames. How? Numerous books and videos out there. Most endgames are with rooks and pawns, or just kings and pawns, so concentrate on those first. Try to learn and understand well one thing at a time: one position, etc. A good starting point is simply Wikipedia on endgames. Learning even one thing well has a spillover effect, because you're also learning how to think in endgames. Reti a century ago had some terrific studies. There is a famous Lasker endgame with kings and pawns, from a real tournament, on which several variations have been composed. Most especially: never underestimate the value of a passed pawn. It's what decides - I'll just guess this - most endgames. Create one first and you're chances of winning usually increased substantially. If the opponent has one, or the potential to create one, worry about that early!
My (rapid) rating is only 1600 and so I'm not the best qualified to give advice, but I have a few thoughts

I read than when polishing a piece of metal to make it shiny, you are not actually making it smooth, what you are doing is replacing coarse scratches by finer scratches
I think improving in chess is the same: improving in chess doesn't consist of not making errors, it consists of making smaller errors

If you compare the games of someone with a rating of 1300 and someone with a rating of 1800 the most striking difference is that the 1300 player is losing pieces and pawns all over the place
In my view the first thing to do is to prevent this, that is, the first thing to do is prevent blunders
I read an interview with Magnus Carlsen and he said that it is surprising just how far you can go in chess by doing nothing more than not dropping pieces and pawns
In my view not making blunders by itself would give a player a rating of at least 1800

With respect to the endgame, I think there are a few factors

First, it could simply be that you lack familiarity with the endgame, you have played lots more openings and middlegames than endgames; this is easy to fix, all you need to do is play more games, play more endgames, and with experience the endgame won't feel so foreign

Second, there are basic (and helpful) rules for endgames, such as: put rooks behind passed pawns, put rooks on the seventh rank, and start attacking with your king; I read that in the standard evaluation where bishops are worth 3 pawns, rooks 5 pawns and so on, that a king is worth 4 pawns

Third, tactics play (in my view) a large role in endgames
In some ways the endgame is better than the middlegame for tactics: with few pieces on the board it is easier to calculate variations and easier to calculate longer variations

It is a myth that people who start later can't become excellent players: at the moment all the best players were already extremely strong when they were teenagers, so it was simply impossible for them to vastly increase their rating after they pass the age of 20
They quickly advanced when they were starting out and other people can do the same, they did it when they were children, you can do it as an adult

I have another piece of subjective advice
Don't choose openings because current theory (or fashion) prefers them, choose openings that you are comfortable with, choose openings that suit your style, choose openings that make sense to you
Alexander Alekhine played a huge number of Queen's Gambits in his career, in my opinion the Queen's Gambit doesn't suit his style and he would have had even more success if he had played more tactical openings
You may not have any clear preference for a playing style now, but if you notice in the future that you tend to prefer open positions or closed positions, tactical chess or positional chess, then there are openings that suit those predilections and I think you should choose openings that have these characteristics

You wrote that you want to play without blunders (you and me both)
Perhaps others have better suggestions on how to prevent them but the only method I can think of is to carefully check for blunders every time you make a move
When I do puzzles I have a mental checklist: examine all pieces that are being attacked, examine all checks, examine all pieces that are undefended

I would add with what has been said:

You have some specific situations that must be studied such as the lucena position / the philidor position ...

What you need as well is look for courses or video like bishop vs knight in the endgame or bishops endgames. You have lot's of simple trick that will improve your knowledge a lot.

When I discover the first time that in a bishop vs a bishop of the same color with lots of pawns to win you need to put your pawns on the opposite color of your bishop. i was like euh ... humm ... ok and more and more you use that idea you see that it works ^^ Now it is completely natural to me.

yeah study some specific situation and use them in your games.

A great great book that I would recommend is by Jeremy Silmann Complete endgames.

he is an excellent teacher + he sorted out what you need to know by rating. And step by step your knowledge will be built
The main reason people don't get better with endgames is that they don't play endgames. Online, they often choose to play with shorter time controls and without increments. For that reason they seldom enter endgames, because matches are often decisive in the middlegame. And when they finally do, they are so low on time that there's no more time to think about the moves. My suggestion is using the 15+15 classical time control here as much as possible. It will also improve many other aspects of your game faster than those ridiculous 1 or 3 min controls.

The second mistake is to not think about your moves. Often endgames look very simple and innoxious. It's easy to loose your concentration after tiring game. Being tired and lazy you end up making the natural looking intuitive move without calculating a single move ahead. Suddenly you realize that you just blitzed your king into opposition and will loose the game or something similar. Endgames are complicated and even grandmasters blunder games here. So take the time to think about the position and every move.

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