Masters of the Endgame

Before continuing with A Textbook for Teaching Endgames, I'd like to return to a post from earlier this year, Four Endgames to Know, where I built a database of endgames from books dedicated to that phase of the game. On top of letting me determine which endgames are the most frequent in instructional books, my database also told me which players' games provide the most material for endgame study. Here's the list.

166	Karpov
126	Fischer
102	Capablanca
57	Botvinnik
51	Alekhine
43	Kasparov
42	Seirawan
39	Smyslov
33	Larsen
30	Petrosian
29	Lasker

For example, there are 166 games on my database where Karpov was one of the players. That doesn't mean 166 different games, because some games appeared in more than one book. The counts do not include games from Chess Informant Endgames. That resource might be useful for a similar exercise.

The first four names are at the top of the list because one book was dedicated to the games of that player. Again taking Karpov as an example, the book is 'Endgame Virtuoso Anatoly Karpov' by Karolyi & Aplin, which includes 106 endgames by the 12th World Champion. Fischer has two such books, while Seirawan is on the list because his endgame book includes many examples from his own games. Larsen appears to be on the list because he was on the losing side of many examples. Having noted that, it takes a great game to beat a great player, making his games still worthy of special attention.

I'll come back to the list above in a future post or two. Games for these players selected by more than one author would make a good start for special analysis.