Squeezing Equal Endgames
The half-point that gets away
When the pieces come off and the evaluation settles on equality, most players reach for the draw. Anatoly Karpov spent a career doing the opposite. He treated "equal" as a starting position rather than a verdict, tightening his grip until an ending that could not be lost was quietly lost anyway.
That instinct sits at the heart of one of the most common mistakes in chess: the assumption that an equal endgame must end in a draw. Nothing could be further from the truth. Equal endgames — precisely because both sides relax once the position looks balanced — are where the heaviest errors are made, and where a patient player finds wins that were never supposed to exist.
What the course teaches
GM Vladimir Malakhov and GM Pier Luigi Basso built this course around a single goal: to show how a position that begins completely balanced can be turned into a full point. The method is accumulation — improving the pieces, posing small problems, and letting pressure do the work until the opponent finally cracks. Both authors treat this as a genuine and deeply respected craft, and the material reflects it: fifteen deeply annotated games drawn from their own practice alongside top-level battles, including endings by Karpov, Kasparov and Carlsen — the players who turned squeezing into an art.
Inside the course
Squeezing Equal Endgames is a Modern Chess Premium course, and includes:
- 15 annotated model games — from the authors' own practice and elite play (Karpov, Kasparov, Carlsen)
- 20 test positions
- Video instruction
- Multilingual PGN (English, German, French, Spanish)
Readers who want to broaden their technique on the practical side of the endings can explore the platform's Practical Endgames collection, where this course sits alongside related work on turning equal positions into results.
Rethinking the draw
Work through the fifteen games and the word "equal" stops meaning "draw." The next time an ending simplifies and your opponent offers a handshake, you will be looking for the win instead.