Get Strong at the Endgame is one of the best books in the 'Get Strong At' series. It contains a total of 291 endgame problems, followed by an appendix comparing a 3d amateur's and a 6D professional's playing of the same full-board endgame position against a pro 7-dan. The amateur loses by one point, the pro wins by 7, a pretty big swing of eight points. The book begins with 42 problems to test your endgame skill, thirty-six on 11x11 and six on 9x9, almost all from Kano Yoshinori's 'Endgame Dictionary'.

The author recommends writing down the moves and final score of each problem without looking at the solution, proceeding directly to the tesuji and calculation problems, and then returning and redoing the test to compare your answers. While this method will show you what a big improvement the book makes in your endgame, most may simply want to work through the solutions the first time, without losing any advantage.

The 120 tesuji problems illustrate various local situations where you can reduce the opponent's territory anywhere from one point to total devastation compared with ordinary looking endgame moves. The 101 calculation problems give you practice in knowing how many points an endgame move is worth, in sente or gote. The final section contains twenty-eight 11x11 'practical endgame problems', again composed by Kano. These help put all the skills together in complicated endgame situations.

This book is nicely crafted and well thought out, with good explanations, suffering only a little from the series' general problem of a lack of instructional material. It does a good job of noting the different value of sente and gote moves, for example, but one could still miss the forest for the trees without caveats like that from Ogawa and Davies: 'A player who could not count at all, but understood the difference between sente and gote, would have the advantage over an opponent suffering from the reverse affliction.'

Nevertheless, 'Get Strong at the Endgame' is well done enough as a problem book that in my opinion it would be fine as a challenging first endgame book for players stronger than 4 kyu. Players at the low dan level will find it just about right. Players less than 5 kyu will probably get more from Ogawa and Davies' excellent Elementary Go Series book: 'The Endgame'. Learn these skills, and you will be amazed at how many times you find yourself coming from behind and winning the game.

This book starts with 42 endgame problems on an 11x11 board, has 120 endgame tesuji problems, 101 endgame calculation problems, and then 28 more 11x11 problems. There's also an appendix showing the same endgame being played by a professional against an amateur and by a professional against a professional.

They want you to do the first 42 problems but not look at the answers; then, come back to them after you've done the tesuji and calculation problems and see how much your game has improved. I was a little bit dubious of that when I read it, but I tried it anyways and kept copies of my results both times, and the results were impressive: I got eight of the problems correct both times, I got 15 of them wrong the first time and right the second time, I got 10 of them equally wrong both times, I got eight of them wrong both times but less wrong the second time, and I got one of them wrong both times but less wrong the first time. So on 23 of the 42 problems I did better the second time, I did equally well both times on 18 of them, and on one of them I did better the first time. I did spend somewhat more time thinking the second time through, but not enough more time to make that kind of difference. (By the way, I recommend that you xerox the problem pages twice when doing this so you'll have something to write down your answers on both times.)

On the whole, this book is really quite nice. The theory of endgame play seems straightforward, but you really need to go through a book like this to understand how it works in practice. The final set of 11x11 problems is much more realistic than the earlier set, and I didn't actually manage to make it through all of them; it will take a while practicing these techniques in real games and going through this book again before I'm really up to speed with the endgame. But I think that this book is already started paying off in my real games, getting me to spend more time counting various situations on the board and occasionally spotting a tesuji that I might not have spotted otherwise. So I wholeheartedly recommend it.

This book doesn't explain the theory to you (though some of that does appear in the solutions to some of the 11x11 problems); for that, they refer you to The Endgame, by Ogawa and Davies, which is the only other book on the endgame that has been published in English. I would definitely recommend reading it before reading this one, though you certainly don't have to have mastered its contents to be able to get a lot out of this book. I wish that another publisher would put out a more advanced theoretical endgame book, but in the mean time you can get a long way by going through those two books.

The 11x11 problems were taken from Kano Yoshinori's Yose Jiten (with a few exceptions).