Bishop Endgames – Essential Knowledge for the Practical Player
The Principle That Decides More Games Than Theory
There is a principle in same-colored bishop endgames so deceptively simple that it often goes unspoken in theoretical texts: fix your opponent's pawns on the color of their bishop, and place your own on the opposite color. It sounds almost too general to be useful. And yet, game after game at the highest level, the player who internalizes this asymmetry — not merely knows it, but feels it — is the one who converts or survives when the clock pressure mounts. This is the starting point of Bishop Endgames – Essential Knowledge for the Practical Player, a new course by GM Felix Blohberger and GM Pier Luigi Basso.
A Focused, Practical Approach to Same-Colored Bishops
What makes this course distinct is its refusal to treat the bishop endgame as a passive technical exercise. Blohberger frames the material around active decisions: when to create a passed pawn, how to activate the bishop toward key weaknesses, when king centralization shifts the evaluation entirely, and — most critically — when trading bishops to enter a pawn endgame is the winning idea and when it loses by a single tempo.
That last point is where games are actually decided, not in a failure to know the theory, but in a miscalculation of the resulting pawn endgame. The course confronts this directly. Zugzwang motifs, patience as a deliberate strategic tool, and the discipline of working through endgame studies all form part of the instructional philosophy — reflecting Blohberger's view that calculation skills and pattern recognition in these positions can only be built through concrete training.
GM Pier Luigi Basso, whose work on Modern Chess spans elite opening repertoires, pawn structure courses, and deep structural analyses, brings his characteristic precision to the material's selection and framing. Together, Blohberger and Basso have built this as a self-contained, practically oriented guide — not a theoretical encyclopedia, but a coherent set of positions and principles that apply directly to decisions you face in real tournament games. Those familiar with their previous collaboration, Rook Endgames – Essential Knowledge for the Practical Player, will recognize the same editorial approach: clarity over exhaustiveness, practical relevance over abstract completeness.
Course Structure
- 10 Lessons
- 9 Recent Game Examples
- 7 Carefully Selected Test Positions
- Video Instruction
- Multilingual PGN Availability (English, German, French, Spanish)
Small Decisions, Decisive Results
The player who converts a same-colored bishop endgame rarely does so with a single brilliant move. It's the accumulation of small, correct decisions — pawn placement, bishop activation, king timing — that makes the difference. This course is where that understanding becomes reliable.
Bishop Endgames – Essential Knowledge for the Practical Player is available now on Modern Chess. Explore the course and add a genuinely reliable layer to your endgame preparation.