The top 10 endgames of 2023!

by Karsten Müller
12/29/2023 – Karsten Müller is both an endgame expert and a major enthusiast of the final phases of a chess battle. Here he presents the 10 top endgames of the year, a selection of the most interesting and substantial positions seen on the board throughout 2023!

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A revitalized phase of the game

In the early history of chess tournaments, a great deal of attention was paid to the endgame. Players like Akiba Rubinstein or Raúl Capablanca were unrivalled endgame virtuosos. In later years, research into openings and the search for improvements in the early phases of the middlegame became more prominent.

With Magnus Carlsen, however, things changed, since we got a world champion who was once again very interested in the endgame and put a lot of energy into this phase of the game. In his younger years, Carlsen saved many games with his outstanding skills in the endgame and then cemented his role as the world’s best player, particularly thanks to his fantastic endgame skills. Incidentally, as some may still remember, he mentioned that he had intensively studied the book Fundamental Chess Endings by Karsten Müller and Frank Lamprecht.

GM Müller has picked out ten endgames played in 2023 that particularly inspired him. Magnus Carlsen is represented twice in this selection. One in which the Norwegian wins an endgame with queens and (initially) knights, and an endgame with rooks and knights. Anish Giri also appears twice in the list. But other players who are not so high up in the world rankings are also capable of handling endgames in anexemplary manner!


Replay Karsten Müller’s Endgame Magic Show #259: Endgames from 2023


The top 10 endgames of the year

Here are Karsten Müller’s top 10 endgames of the year. Enjoy!


Magical Chess Endgames Vol. 1 & 2 + The magic of chess tactics

In over 4 hours in front of the camera, Karsten Müller presents to you sensations from the world of endgames - partly reaching far beyond standard techniques and rules of thumb - and rounds off with some cases of with own examples.


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Karsten Müller is considered to be one of the greatest endgame experts in the world. His books on the endgame - among them "Fundamentals of Chess Endings", co-authored with Frank Lamprecht, that helped to improve Magnus Carlsen's endgame knowledge - and his endgame columns for the ChessCafe website and the ChessBase Magazine helped to establish and to confirm this reputation. Karsten's Fritztrainer DVDs on the endgame are bestsellers. The mathematician with a PhD lives in Hamburg, and for more than 25 years he has been scoring points for the Hamburger Schachklub (HSK) in the Bundesliga.

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