If you want to win at chess, begin with the ending. —Irving Chernev
A lot has been written to date about endgame, but what’s the endgame? How to properly define it and how to know when the middlegame ends and endgame starts is a subject of discussion.
The usual definition is the obvious “final stage of a game” but this is not accurate at all, some games finish before the endgame starts like a player being checkmated in the middlegame or win by resigning before the endgame starts. Sometimes a fatal blunder in the opening may finish the game before the endgame, or even the middlegame starts.
Other theories say that the endgame starts when an exchange of queens takes place, but this is just an approximation to the topic. We can see endgames with queens or middlegames without them.
Other way to define the endgame is “the stage of the game with relatively few pieces on the board” and probably it is the most accurate even being so generic.
The subtleties of openings and the excitement of learning new moves which are said to give advantages to the player in the middle game make of openings a much studied chess topic. The wide variety of combinations and attacks in the middlegame makes it exciting and interesting to play, these are the reasons for some players to study these two phases, but they fall into the trap of not learning properly about endgames.
The usual objective of an opening is to get advantage in the middlegame, and the middlegame strategies are designed to create a favorable ending for us, so it won’t be practical to make such openings and/or middlegame strategies if you can’t take profit of the advantage you fought to achieve throughout the whole game. As Capablanca said, no stage of the game reveals the true power of the pieces as does the endgame.
A player who plays correctly an endgame can overtake the advantage lost in the middlegame and will finish the game successfully if he had an advantage. Any good player or coach will tell you that learning openings and middlegame strategies without knowing how to properly finish them lacks of any sense. The endgame is defined by three main characteristics which we must recognize in order to properly say we are at the endgame stage of the game and also to develop a proper play when we are playing one.
1) Endgames favor an aggressive king: At endgames the king acquires an important attacking king. The lack of pieces favors the movement of the king.
2) In the endgames, the importance of passed pawns is boosted. Passed pawns have a key value in the endgame and can make the difference between winning and losing a game.
3) As Zugzwong said “the “compulsion to move” when doing so forces a player into a worsened or even losing posi¬tion”
As a conclusion, any successful chess player must first know how to play an endgame and then start learning a wide range of openings and middlegame tactics.