GM Valeriy Aveskulov starts his acclaimed endgame course with this short - but very sweet - guide to help you get better at same-colored bishop endgames (SCBE).
As a adherent of Mark Dvoretsky's method of coaching, the author supports his idea about the optimal way to study chess endgames.
First, Dvoretsky's method states that one needs to study the theory of a given type of endgame; secondly, a player needs to improve his or her practical skills with exercises.
Learn to love SCBE endings
Nowadays, it is certainly no secret that a lot of players ignore studying endgames. But since you are already reading this text, you are not one of them.
Evidently, the question that led you to find this course, is "how to improve one's endgame skills?"
You have already found some good books on the endgames and probably have read some of them. But you have an understandable fear, that when this or that endgame happens in your own game, you can forget most of what you have read.
So, the next step is to turn the adopted knowledge from above-mentioned books and other sources - into your unconscious knowledge. Remember, that modern time controls do not give a chance to think deeply when you get to the endgame.
Training intuition
Intuition plays a primary role in such conditions. Geniuses already have a good intuition, the rest of us should train a lot!
This course will provide you with a lot of exercises to achieve the goal. You will see both simple basic things and then more and more difficult examples, in which even deep analysis does not answer the question of "is this winning or drawn?".
Most examples in the book were given to author's students during the lessons and together they have been finding more and more improvements, interesting ideas, refutations and so on.
The course provides quite a good quality of analytics since hours were spent on most of the examples.
But even considering this, you can read there, that holes are possible.
The author does not claim to close the topic; he just opens the veil of SCBE, shares his thoughts and gives concrete advice about how to take decisions in SCBE.
After taking this course, you will definitely feel a desire to enter to SCBE much more frequently than you used to do earlier!
