While writing some recent blog articles on rook and pawn endgames, I made use of a couple of very useful endgame tools. They are probably well-known to everyone, but just in case…

 

Online 6-man Nalimov Tablebases

 

Enter any 6-man endgame – for example K,R & P vs K,R & P – and see an exhaustive list of every possibility in the position, together with its evaluation.

 

These are available online from http://www.k4it.de/?topic=egtb&lang=en

 

FinalGen

 

Sometimes a 6-man tablebase is just not enough! Sometimes you want to know the result of a specific position with 7 or 8 men! FinalGen is a freely available download with which you can calculate your own tablebase for a specific position. You don’t need a particularly powerful computer for that – the program seems to use very little CPU and Memory – but a lot of (fast) disk space is definitely required!

 

FinalGen is available for download from this location: http://finalgenchess.ovh/home_ing.php