10/31/2023 – Chess stalemates in the middle games reveal the intricacy and beauty of this uncommon occurrence, offering various unique and engrossing endgame analyses. To show the variety of inventiveness and strategic nuance present in these unusual circumstances, Siegfried Hornecker presents a number of examples of midboard stalemates. These range from complex endgames to complicated compositions by well-known chess composers like Vladimir Bron and Emil Melnichenko. | Photo: Midjourney

9/30/2023 – Possibly readers would enjoy a little bit of behind-the-scenes information on how chess composers work together. As always, this will be supplemented by endgame studies.| Photo: Midjourney

8/31/2023 – We talked a few times about Genrikh Kasparyan already, this time we delve a bit into his book “Domination in 2545 Endgame Studies”. At the time, the book served as a great anthology and also a small theoretical introduction to the theme. | Photo: Midjourney AI

7/29/2023 – Two years ago, we had a collection of “random” endgame studies, a small kaleidoscope, in January, and then again in July. With the vast number of different possibilities in endgame studies, many creations wouldn’t fit into a coherent article, so let us take this approach again. | Pictured: Mikhail Botvinnik during his match for the world crown against David Bronstein in 1951

6/3/2023 – Genrikh Kasparyan is widely regarded as one of the most prolific endgame study composers and shared his knowledge with a younger generation. So his son Sergey also composed endgame studies - 56 are in the database, including versions and corrections. But also other friends from Genrikh's endgame studies teaching circle created interesting ones themselves or together. | Photo: Midjourney AI

5/11/2023 – In the World Chess Championship, which still was running while this article was written but will be over when you read it, Ding Liren won the sixth game by threatening a checkmate with rook and knight. Let us see how that kind of checkmate was used in endgame studies. | Photo: Midjourney AI

4/14/2023 – Tim Krabbé's 1985 book "Chess Curiosities" showed a study by the Bulgarian chess composer I. Ionchev, flawed but nevertheless interesting. Yours truly tried to follow in his footsteps. Nadareishvili explored the same concept, and it might be unfair to associate the name with Ionchev as he was neither the first, the last, nor the most important one to show it - only the most famous. | Photo: Pixabay

3/28/2023 – Castling in endgame studies is a rich and entertaining topic - be it real castling, the threat of castling, or even just retroanalysis that proves that castling is impossible. Last year we began a new series in which we chronologically explore the most interesting endgame studies with castling ideas. We aim at a mix between informative and interesting endgame studies again this month, a mostly light-hearted article without too much text. | Photo: Pixabay

2/7/2023 – In the German magazine "Rochade Europa" / "Europa-Rochade", Gerd Wilhelm Hörning and Gerhard Josten had a column in which they presented their findings on incorrect endgame studies, offering also corrections to them. A small retrospective. | Photo: Motionarray - By SeventyFour

12/31/2022 – 64 squares. For some they mean the world. In the past month, the World Congress for Chess Composition was held, as I quickly reported. Among the new books there was also the FIDE Album 2016-2018 (for a history of the FIDE Albums see our September 2019 article) | Photo: Pixabay

11/26/2022 – Pattern recognition is a major feat of the human brain, albeit one that can lead to wrong outputs. Examples include seeing faces where there are none, known as pareidolia. Once it was believed that the planet Mars has a face structure on it, speculations about former inhabitants of the planet ran wild, later it turned out that this isn't the case and could be attributed to the low resolution of the photo. | Photo: Pixabay

10/29/2022 – This month, I planned to write about chess composition in Japan, but it turned out that not much information was obtainable. The situation in Singapore is even worse regarding sources. So instead, in this month's column we have a small mix of shorter articles again. | Photo: Pixabay