Chess notation cheat-sheet (for new readers)
Pieces: K king · Q queen · R rook · B bishop · N knight · (a pawn move has no letter)
Actions: x takes · + check · # mate · O-O short castles · O-O-O long castles · e8=Q pawn promotes to queen
Annotations: ! good move · !! brilliant · ? mistake · ?? blunder
Most points are won and lost in the endgame. Drill the rook, pawn, bishop, knight and queen endgames that decide real games.
The solver above serves every endgame pattern at once. Drag the Elo slider to your level. Or pick a single motif from the grid.
Drilling the endgames that decide actual games
Most amateur games that reach an endgame land in one of two pools: a rook-and-pawn position or a pure king-and-pawn race. If you have an hour a week for endgame puzzles, spend roughly forty minutes on those two and split the rest across the others. That is not a guess. It matches what shows up in club databases, and it matches what I see when I review members' games on Lichess.
Start with king and pawn puzzles, because the rules there (opposition, the rule of the square, key squares in front of a passed pawn) carry into every other endgame. Once you stop miscounting tempi in pure pawn races, move to the rook endgame trainer. Rook endings reward two habits: rook behind the passed pawn, and active king. The trainer drills both without lecturing you.
After those two, add a short weekly set of bishop endgame puzzles, because the same-color versus opposite-color read is a game-saving skill that almost no club player practices on purpose.
How to use the endgame puzzles trainer for daily practice
My routine for endgame puzzles is shorter than people expect. Fifteen minutes, four or five days a week, beats one ninety-minute Sunday session. The reason is that endgame patterns decay fast if you do not refresh them. The trainer is built for short repeat sessions: the Elo slider remembers where you set it, and the next-puzzle countdown keeps you moving instead of staring.
Set the slider about 150 points below your blitz rating for the first week. Endgame puzzles feel harder than tactics puzzles at the same number, because the calculation depth is longer and the wrong move often looks natural. If a position stumps you for more than two minutes, use one hint, write down what you missed, and move on. Do not burn ten minutes hunting for the only move in a queen-and-pawn race; you will retain the lesson better if you see the answer, replay it, and meet a similar position three days later.
One concrete loop I use with students: ten rook ending positions, five king-and-pawn positions, then two queen ending puzzles as a cool-down. Same order every session. The repetition is the point.
How endgame puzzles motifs show up in your real games
The transfer from endgame puzzles to real games is more direct than tactics transfer, and that is the quiet reason endgame work pays off so well. When you spot a Lucena bridge in a puzzle, you will spot the same shape in a tournament game six months later. The board has fewer pieces, so the pattern is harder to hide.
Three things move from the trainer into your games almost immediately. First, king activity in pawn endings: after a week of pawn endgame puzzles you stop leaving your king on the back rank. Second, rook placement: rook endgame puzzles retrain your hand to put the rook behind the passed pawn instead of in front of it. Third, the opposite-color bishop instinct: after a session on bishop endgame positions, you start asking "do the bishops match" before you push for a win, which has saved my students more half-points than any opening I have ever taught.
Heavy-piece positions transfer too, just slower. The queen-and-rook trainer mostly trains pattern recognition for forks and perpetuals that hide in messy late middlegames.
FAQs
How long should I practice endgame puzzles per day?
Fifteen to twenty minutes, four or five days a week, is enough. Endgame work compounds more than tactics work, because the patterns repeat and there are fewer of them, but it also fades fast if you skip a week. A shorter daily session beats a long weekend cram. If you only have time for two sessions a week, do thirty minutes each and stick to one theme per session.
What rating range are these endgame puzzles for?
The trainer covers roughly 800 to 2400 on the Elo slider, so it works for a club player learning the Philidor draw and for a stronger player drilling queen-versus-pawn-on-the-seventh. Start about 150 points below your blitz rating, because endgame positions feel one level harder than tactics at the same number. Move the slider up only when you are solving cleanly without hints.
How do hints work in the endgame trainer?
Each puzzle has a single graded hint that names the idea (king to a key square, rook behind the passed pawn) without giving the move. The hint is meant as a rescue, not a shortcut. Burn it after two minutes of honest thought; you retain the pattern better when you see the move yourself after a nudge than when you grind out the answer alone.
Are these endgame puzzles from real games?
Yes. Every position in the trainer comes from a real online game, filtered to keep only positions where engine analysis confirms a single best move or a single saving idea. There are no constructed studies and no composed problems. You are solving the same decisions real players faced, which is why the patterns transfer.
Which endgames matter most for a club player?
Rook-and-pawn endings come up in roughly two of every three decided endgames at club level, and pure king-and-pawn races come up in another fifteen percent. If you train only two pools, train those two. Bishop and knight endings show up less often but break results harder when they appear, because almost no one at the club level practices them.
Is the endgame trainer free?
Yes. Every theme in the endgame group is free to use without an account: rook, pawn, bishop, knight, queen, and queen-and-rook. There is no daily puzzle cap and no paid tier hidden behind the slider. If you want progress tracking and a personal rating, the broader site offers that, but the puzzles themselves stay open.
