You hold in your hands a remarkable book – one that has the potential to greatly improve your
results on the chess board. The legendary Viktor Korchnoi boldly claimed that anyone who
worked through his book on Practical Rook Endings would be guaranteed to gain at least 100
rating points. Silas Esben Lund, originally from low-key Denmark like myself, is too modest to
make such a claim, so let me do it for him: if you work through this book cover to cover, you
are going to gain at least a similar amount of rating points as from Korchnoi’s book – very likely
more.
But be warned: the emphasis here is on work. What you put in, you will get out – don’t expect
a quick fix. This is a book for the ambitious chess players who are willing to put in the effort to
pursue results through hard work and deliberate practice. The main value of this book is in the depth of the examples and exercises, which are designed to challenge even International Masters and Grandmasters. After trying in vain to solve some of the demanding exercises, I can testify to the difficulty of the challenge!
However, Lund has a knack for making the difficult understandable. His explanations of the
process by which even the most difficult exercises should be (and have been) solved is to the point
and highly instructive. He explains how you can sharpen your skills in calculation; shows how
to identify the Critical Moments in the game; and highlights how the middlegame is connected
to sharp and basic endgames in a logical thread. In doing so, Lund helps his readers improve not
only his or her skills in sharp endgames, but also in the middlegame and technical endgames.
At the core, the emphasis is on making good decisions at critical stages of the game. For that you
need to combine several aspects – calculation, intuition, creativity, basic knowledge of chess, just
to name a few. And you have to weave these components together into a useful and practical
process. This is not easy, as many players tend to be biased in one way or another when making
decisions in chess.
When trying to solve some of the exercises, I was reminded of an episode from a training session
the Danish National Team had in Copenhagen with the legendary Russian coach Mark Dvoretsky,
shortly before the 2000 Olympiad in Istanbul. Dvoretsky was feeding us difficult exercises,
similar to those of Lund in this book, and one of them was a deceptively simple rook endgame
where Black needed to decide where to go with his king in reply to a check. Using intuition and
drawing on my long-term interest and experience in rook endgames, I quickly settled on the
right move, but Dvoretsky was not happy with my intuitive decision. He wanted me to calculate
and show the line that led to the right decision. While I got it right in this particular instance,
Dvoretsky reasoned that being overly reliant on intuition – as opposed to calculation – was a
dangerous bias at Critical Moments. Certainly not all Critical Moments can be solved by intuition
only. I took the advice to heart and forced myself to calculate deeper at Critical Moments. Shortly
thereafter I had an excellent result at the Olympiad, and a year and a half later I reached a new
personal best FIDE rating, despite being semi-retired at the time. This book has the potential to
do the same for readers who choose to put in the effort – it will improve your ability to make the
right decisions at the Critical Moments late in the game.
Out of the many great examples and exercises in this book, I will single out the study by Troitzky
(1925) that opens Chapter 2. Unfamiliar to me, this study epitomizes how good decisions draw
on a combination of calculation, intuition, creativity, and knowledge of basic endgames. A delight
for chess fans interested in both studies and practical play!
I have known Silas for many years from the chess circuit in our shared home country, and I have
always liked Silas’s approach to chess, and chess coaching and writing in particular. Silas is an
independent thinker who weaves plenty of personal experiences and games into his coaching and
writing. And he shares a very important trait with other excellent coaches – he actually has a well-
considered coaching philosophy.
His book is extensively researched – not just in terms of the chess content, but also how expertise is achieved – and all the examples have been thoroughly checked by analysis engines and tested on chess students of various strength. As a result, this book is more than just a book – it is a curriculum for how to improve your chess.
Silas likes to take on topics that are under-represented in chess literature. I thoroughly enjoyed
his earlier books, which are filled with new concepts that you will find in few other chess books.