100 Basic Endgames You Must Know A Starter’s Guide to Chess Endgames + PGN May 18, 2026

Build a Strong Endgame Foundation
Without the Overwhelm

If you haven’t studied basic endgames yet, you’re sitting on one of the easiest rating gains available. With just a handful of key concepts, you can start making smarter decisions in the middlegame, stop throwing away winning endings, and even save games that seem completely lost.

The problem for beginner and intermediate players is that most endgame material doesn’t focus on these essentials. Instead, it overwhelms you with deep theory and positions that feel far removed from your real games.

This course takes a different approach. It focuses only on the 100 most basic and common endgames, helping you build a solid foundation without the overwhelm — whether you’re just starting out or filling gaps as a more advanced player.

Grandmaster Jesús de la Villa has created this course as a simplified version of his worldwide bestseller 100 Endgames You Must Know. You’ll learn through a proven method, now made accessible to players in the 800-2000 rating range.

The video lessons are presented by Grandmaster Peter Heine Nielsen, one of the most renowned coaches in chess and a long-time trainer of Magnus Carlsen.

You’ll build your knowledge step by step, starting from the very basics:

A must-know: mate with rook and king

Once you’ve mastered how to mate the lone king in the most common scenarios, you move on to more complex topics, like pawn endgames.

With clear explanations and practical examples, essential concepts like outflanking, opposition, zugzwang, and the square rule become tools you can actually use:

By advancing, White keeps
Black’s king out of the square of the pawn,
making the promotion unstoppable.

We don’t think, we activate our knowledge – Peter Heine Nielsen

As you work through the course, you’ll realize that you often don’t need deep calculation. In many endgames, simply knowing a key concept is enough to find the right move.

In many positions the solution is obvious if you know the idea, but extremely difficult to find with calculation alone:

In such positions, advance pawns
to squares matching the enemy bishop’s color.
Counterintuitive, but simple if you know about blockades.

Even if you’re an advanced player who could work things out over the board, it helps to know these basics like the back of your hand. When they become automatic, you save valuable time, especially in rapid and blitz, but also in classical games under time pressure.

Another good example for this is the Lucena position. Once you’re familiar with it, you’ll know what to do at a glance to avoid throwing away winning rook endgames like this:

You’ll learn how to “build the bridge” in the Lucena position
to make sure your pawn promotes.

The tools you’ll learn in this course will help you approach your games with greater confidence, knowing you have reliable resources to fall back on.

Here are some of the most important ones:

♟️ Simple checkmates
Learn essential mating patterns like staircase mates, basic queen/rook mates and mate with two bishops, helping you convert winning positions without hesitation.

♟️ Fundamental pawn endgames
Study how the right king placement decides the result in pawn endgames. Along the way, you’ll learn essential concepts like opposition, zugzwang, and triangulation.

♟️ Minor piece endings
Learn how to stop passed pawns, when to sacrifice material, and other practical rules in endgames involving knights, bishops and pawns.

♟️ Fortresses
Build impenetrable drawing setups in lost positions, giving you saving chances even when things seem hopeless

♟️ Key rook endgames
Convert wins and defend tough positions in the most common rook endgames, including Philidor, Lucena, and the first-rank defense.

♟️ Drawing techniques
Discover practical drawing resources, like perpetual checks, “crazy rook,” and others. Knowing these will help you save half-points in lost positions.

To solidify your knowledge, you’ll practice all of these in two mixed test chapters of different difficulty levels at the end of the course.