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.

Leonid Kubbel along with Troitzky, Rink and the Platov brothers were leading the emerging art of endgame study composing. His early studies were compiled when he was only 13 years old and they showed his great talent. Kubbel saw himself firstly as a problemist. With the early composers he explored and added the strategic themes of the problemists to the genre of the endgame study. Kubbel composed over 500 endgame studies. They are ideal if you starting out as an endgame solver because many of his studies have short snappy solutions which are relatively easy to follow.

White has to act quickly to keep the initiative otherwise the Black Queen will set up tactical tricks against the exposed White Monarch and the pair of Rooks. His winning idea is to drive the King towards his passed pawn so that it can be advanced with check.