In normal chess I think that one of the reasons some people spend most of their chess time looking at openings is because they find the endgames quite dull. Everything worth knowing has been discovered already, you are just learning and memorising instead of looking and finding.

In atomic nobody has this excuse! Endgames are very underanalysed. It seems to me that whenever I try and analyse endgames I find something new, interesting and, until that time, completely unknown.

Until you reach a reasonable level of atomic reaching the endgame is quite rare, and therefore often thought of as a rare occurrence by new players, and therefore maybe thought to be not worthy of any study. However as a player improves and going beyond the traps of the opening happens more often, more endgames will be reached.

In atomic chess I feel that there is a rough order in which endgames should be learnt, like 'building blocks' of the endgame. This is because to understand some endgames you must have mastered others, which may at first seem unrelated. In this way the endgames are very different to normal chess.

Part 2:Queen endgames