Chess endgame literature

Chess endgame literature refers to books and magazines about chess endgames. A bibliography of endgame books is below.

Many chess writers have contributed to the theory of endgames over the centuries, including Ruy López de Segura, François-André Philidor, Josef Kling and Bernhard Horwitz, Johann Berger, Alexey Troitsky, Yuri Averbakh, and Reuben Fine. Using computers, Ken Thompson, Eugene Nalimov, and others have contributed by constructing endgame tablebases.

Some endgame books are general works about many different kinds of endgames whereas others are limited to specific endgames such as rook endgames or pawnless endgames. Most books are one volume (of varying size), but there are large multi-volume works. Most books cover endgames in which the proper course of action (see list of chess terms#Optimal play) has been analyzed in detail. However, an increasing number of books are about endgame strategy, where exact analysis is not currently possible, due to the presence of more pieces. These endgame strategy books fill the gap from the end of the middlegame to where the other type of books takes over.

The study of a few practical endgames are found in Arabic manuscripts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. However, these are from before the rule of pawn promotion, so most are of little value today (Golombek 1977:101). A thirteenth-century Latin book by an unknown author examined the endgame of a knight versus a pawn, and formed the basis of later work by Alexey Troitsky in the twentieth century. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a few types of endgames were studied, and opposition was known (Golombek 1977:101).

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