Mikhail Zinars Difficult Pawn Endings: A World Champion's Favorite Composers by Sergei Tkachenko

Mikhail Zinars Difficult Pawn Endings: A World Champion's Favorite Composers by Sergei Tkachenko

Sergei Tkachenko, a member of the Ukrainian team that won the 5th World Chess Composition Tournament in 1997 and which came second in 2000, 2004, 2013, and 2017, has selected 100 pawn endings composed by the leading Ukrainian problemist Mikhail Zinar.

Zinar was a prolific endgame expert who produced several hundred studies since the 1970s, with a focus on pawn endings. His works appeared in many leading Russian-language chess publications, including Chess in the USSR, 64 - Chess Review, and Chess Bulletin. He collaborated with Yuri Averbakh on the second edition of Averbakh's Chess Endings (1983), in which he revised the theory of corresponding squares. In the foreword, Averbakh wrote: Chapter ten, devoted to corresponding square systems, was written by chess composer M.A. Zinar - a big specialist in pawn endings. Otherwise, this chapter would have looked out of date.

Zinar co-authored a Russian-language manual for creating pawn studies with Vladimir Archakov in 1990 called Harmony of the Pawn Study. He collaborated with Tkachenko in compiling this book.

This is the first book in a new series of endgame studies compiled by Sergei Tkachenko, in which each book focuses on a particular composer, published by Elk and Ruby Publishing House.

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Sergei Tkachenko (born 1963 near Odessa, Ukraine) is a member of the Ukrainian chess composition team that won the 5th World Chess Composition Competition in 1997 and placed second in 2000, 2004, 2013, and 2017. He has won the studies part of the Ukrainian Chess Composition Championship six times, as well as prizes in over 100 international chess composition events, many of them for first place. Sergei is the coach of the Ukrainian composition chess team. He is also the publicity secretary for the Ukrainian Chess Federation's Chess Composition Committee. Sergei is a multi-award-winning author who has published 18 chess books (in Russian), including compositions and historical studies.

He is the deputy chief editor of Problemist of Ukraine, a Ukrainian chess composition magazine, and writes a regular studies section for the ChessPro website. Sergei is a journalist who belongs to the Ukrainian Union of Journalists. He is a mechanical engineering graduate, as well as a historian and archivist.