6-men Nalimov End Games

The phases of chess games have been already set long time ago. The endgames, no dispute, have been elaborated by many authors on sevaral examples (e.g. J.Averbach: Chess Endgames) or others. One of the first pioneers who began to examine the deterministic approach of the endgames, how games finish, how to reach the goal in the quickest time was Eugen Nalimov. At the beginning he analyzed 3-4-5 pieces board and later on added the 6 pieces (-6 men including the kings). The basic information about his work and tablebases can be found at : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablebase with many sub-links and supportive articles.

The authors of openingmaster.com have collected all Nalimov’s endgames 3-4-5 but also all 6 endgames. See http://kirill-kryukov.com/chess/tablebases-online/ .

It is a respectful number of 295 6-men endgames in 2,512 files totaling 1,232 Tera-bytes. There are several professional articles examining how much one should actually own at his local hard drive or disk in order to be efficient. Several players prefer to have all endgames (100% coverage) with of course high peak time of loading the program for indexing the endgames yet some claim to need only 200-300 MB of these endgames. (but with coverage more than 90%).
The catastrophic scenario comes when one needs the endgame but doesn’t have it loaded on the hard disk. The downloading of any endgame from the internet is very time consuming and patient work with knowledge of the best resources to look for.

Download with the link below entire 295 endgames summary excel sheet with frequency statistics.

  tablebase.xls52 KB

Therefore our service which is offered for the first time ever on the internet is basically priceless. Some companies try to offer endgames on DVDs but as you can imagine the volume of DVDs compared to our ‘terabytes’ they cannot get even close to the numbers openingmaster.com offers.

At our website you can decide how much of endgames do you really need but also the method of storing the data. You can send us the media which is not approaching its life-end (e.g large enough hard disks or other storage devices capable of storing 1.3 terabytes) where we upload the endgames or we can purchase the new HDD for you and record the endgames and mail it to you. Unfortunately, to download these data in tera-bytes is simply not possible; however with increasing speed on the internet we believe it may be possible in few years.

As there are many possibilities how to send data to you and expenses may vary from your custom situation e.g.:

1) Cost of shipment to your country (insurance / no insurance) = usually around 25 EUR per insured box / airmail
2) Type of shipment (regular post/ DHL/ UPS) . Regular shipment is much cheaper than UPS or DHL
3) Media decision (yours, ours, type of storage media). Much faster is if we buy certified HDD (e.g. WD, Hitachi, Samsung) with global warranty and upload data there. Typically one 2.0 TB HDD costs 170 EUR
4) Computer port connections (ATA, SATA, eSATA, USB 2.0 or USB 3.0) you choose.
5) Number of endgames. Here we prefer all package. Since splitting the games per frequency of occurance or type of endgame is very time consuming and manual effort. 

We will send you the detailed calculation plan and agree on the matter of shipment and payment (we accept all major credit cards and also PayPal transfers)

If you are interested please send us your short request to our This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or contact us via contact form and we will contact you back very shortly.

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