Welcome to this active site. Each week I am going to present to you an endgame position for you to solve or to workout the best continuation. Computer analysis will also be considered. Some of these positions will come from actual historical games. Others will be composed endgame studies, but all the solutions will be relevant to the practical game. The new position will occur each SUNDAY and I will always be pleased to receive POSITIVE feedback about the positions and the analysis and I will try to acknowledge these where relevant.

 

American Grandmaster and Chess Author. Born in Riga, Latvia, but settled in New York. In the 1961/62 US Championship he came equal 3rd. A year later he became the first player to defeat Bobby Fischer in a US Championship. In 1978 because of his fourth place in the National Championship, he qualified for the World Championship Interzonal Tournament which was held in his place of birth. In the year 2000 he was inducted into the US Chess Hall of Fame.

White is in a better position here with his more advanced pawns and his active King and Rook. As Edmar often indicated in his writing: Activate the Rook and keep it activated. In order to win White needs to advance his queenside pawns so that the King can cooperate with the active Rook in attacking the enemy pawns.

I would like to consider Edmars unique contribution to the endgame. Altogether he wrote about a dozen books on practical endings and so he became one of the most prolific writers on this phase of the game.

His most successful book on endings was Practical Endgame Lessons which was published by David Mckay in 1978 in the US and in 1979 by Batsford in the UK. This book was an instant success with club players who for a long time had been starved of good books on the final phase of the game. Much of the material in this book had first appeared in Mednis' endgame column he ran for the magazine Chess Life and Review. In 1992 a revised edition was brought out under the co-authorship of Colin Crouch called Rate Your Endgame published by Cadogon.

In 1980's and 1990's he had a fruitful relationship with the publishers Chess Enterprises for whom he wrote seven booklets on the endgame. The first in the series was Practical Rook Endings (1982) In this book he provided straightforward, easy to remember rules for handling many of the basic positions that occur in the final phase of the game. Books on the other pieces followed.

 Without doubt Edmar Mednis holds a high place in the league of writers on the endgame.

His death at a relatively early age is a sad loss to the chess community and particularly to those players interested in endings. 

1. Cumulative 2002 Prizes: 1st £100 or equivalent, 2nd £50, 3rd £30; 4th £20. (Total Prize Money=£200) Entries limited to 20 solvers. This event will run from 6/1/2002 to 22/12/2002 with a recess in July. Present CUMULATIVE COMPETITION rules apply but note the prizes will go to those participants who climb the ladder the greatest number of times during the year. The relative position of the solver's name on the ladder will decide the allocation of prizes.

2. Endgame Solving Tournaments 2002. They will be directed at new or intermediate solvers and will not be too difficult. No money prizes but a book prize for the highest placed newcomer. Events will take place at Easter, Summer and Christmas each consisting of 5 positions to solve. Present strict rules will apply; no computer analysis.