The essence of chess endgame strategy is to turn a one-pawn advantage into a win.
Well, that’s the way I see it, anyway. A win can be manufactured out of a positional advantage, of course, even though the pawns may be even or even if you have a pawn deficit. But even in those kinds of positions, the problem comes down to queening a pawn.
And in most cases, pawn promotion is going to come about because of a material advantage. Most cases.
A lot of the material in this section is going to be devoted to the question of turning a material advantage into an extra Queen, and that almost always means the win of the game.
There are a lot of nuances, of course, and exceptions.
There is also the sporting element. A lot of times a win can be squeezed out of a position simply because your opponent doesn’t know as much about the endgame as you do. The opponent makes a mistake – a mistake that he doesn’t see because he doesn’t have the understanding, but you immediately spot because you have studied chess endgames at some length.
I hope that the articles listed on this page will help you to learn a bit about chess endgame strategy, so that you can be on the winning side of more chess endgames.