This outstanding book is part of the essential Encyclopaedia of Chess Endings, a monumental five volume opus where all chess endings are presented and analyzed in a most clear and comprehensive way.

The diverse volumes are dedicated to Pawn Endings, Rook Endings (two volumes), Minor Pieces Endings, and the IVth volume reviewed here, Queen Endings.

Queen endings have a well deserved fame of being among the most difficult endings in practice. The Queens have awesome power, and on an almost empty board they can roam to and fro, with scores of possible moves, torturing the enemy king with countless checks and threats.

This book features no less than 1800 relevant Queen Endings, taken both from theory and composed studies, as well as actual play. Here you'll find Queen endings from games of absolutely all top Grandmasters and World Champions, both present and past, such as Kasparov, Karpov, Miles, Short, Yusupov, Anand, Korchnoi, Fischer, etc. The alphabetical list begins with Abramov and ends with Zoltan, and everyone who's someone in chess is in there.

All 1800 endings are thoroughly analyzed, including comments, variations, and evaluations, by such contributors specialized in endgames as Adorjan, Averbach, Botvinnik, Ftacnik, Hubner, Minev, Nunn, Speelman, and Svesnikov. Also, this one volume has an added dimension: hundreds among the 1800 endings, the most subtle, difficult ones, have been completely analyzed with the aid of the powerful computer programs BELLE (Ken Thompson), and special-purpose KDKT (Hans Zellner), so you can have exact, error-free, optimum analysis (some of them very, very lengthy and difficult) of a very important subset of endings.

All endings are analyzed using figurine algebraic notation, and all texts are given in 10 languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Greek, Japanese and Arabic, among others. Each one of the 1800 endings has a graphic diagram, with full identification as of players/composer, dates, etc. All comments and evaluations are given using a proprietary code system independent of the language, and include such fine assesments as "White stands slightly better", "development advantage", "a move deserving attention", "novelty", "advantage in number of pawns", "match", or "editorial comment", among some 60 different possibilities covering every nuance.

The endings are classified in 9 different "chapters", from KQ vs K to all kind of combinations of pieces on the board, such as KQN vs KBB or KQ vs KNNB and all variations in between, with or without pawns.

A number of positions are multifaceted in fact, such as #44, which allows the white King to be in 32 different starting squares, and all are dealt with. The amount of detail in the analysis is outstanding, such as position #851 (FEN: 6k1/8/6p1/7p/p6P/4Q1P1/2q5/6K1/ b), where the analysis goes on to 48 full moves, 96 plies, including a sizable number of variations.

Or #705 (FEN: 8/6q1/6P1/8/4Q1K1/k7/8/8/ b), where BELLE gives out the exact 98-ply Principal Variation and sub-variations. Same goes for #238 (FEN: 6Q/8/8/8/3k4/4r3/8/7K/ w), where KDKT prints variations going as deep as 50 plies.

The book closes with two most useful alphabetical indexes, the Index of Players for the endings taken out from actual games, and the Index of Composers for all endings which are in fact composed studies.

Here is a sample position from this book: #1104, quoted from pag. 271: