The Houston XiangQi Association just published the most exciting news, they will organize the World XiangQi Championship in Houston this November!! Hence the need to begin to train seriously, since as shown in the title there are only 284 days to the event!

As Capablanca told me long time ago, yeah I’m revealing my true identity and age, one must start from the endgame to become good at chess, and the same is true for XiangQi! Here the two basic endgames:

This is the solution to this endgame, given in Pychess PGN format, because it can be copied and paste in Winboard and used for training against Fairy Stockfish.

[Event “PyChess casual game”]
[Site “https://www.pychess.org/teCpyrUF”]
[Date “2023.02.07”]
[Round “-“]
[White “Anon-k0Vqb2XZ”]
[Black “Fairy-Stockfish”]
[Result “1-0”]
[TimeControl “300+3”]
[WhiteElo “1500?”]
[BlackElo “1500?”]
[Variant “Xiangqi”]
[FEN “3k1a3/9/3a5/8R/9/9/9/9/9/4K4 w – – 0 1”]
[SetUp “1”]

1. Rb7 Afe9 2. Rb10+ Kd9 3. Kd1 Af8 4. Rb8 Ke9 5. Rxd8 Ke10 6. Rxf8 Ke9 7. Kd2 Ke10 8. Rf9 1-0
   • Another basic endgame is the following:

This is the PGN for those who want to play it out at Pychess.

[Event “PyChess casual game”] [Site “https://www.pychess.org/b68LHQON”] [Date “2023.02.07”] [Round “-“] [White “Anon-2R89vElO”] [Black “Fairy-Stockfish”] [Result “1-0”] [TimeControl “300+3”] [WhiteElo “1500?”] [BlackElo “1500?”] [Variant “Xiangqi”] [FEN “4k1b2/9/4b4/9/3R5/9/9/9/9/3K5 w – – 0 1”] [SetUp “1”] 1. Rd10+ Ke9 2. Ke1 Ei8 3. Ri10 Eg6 4. Rg10 Kf9 5. Re10 Ec6 6. Re6 Ece8 7. Rf6+ Ke9 8. Rxg6 Ke10 9. Re6 Ke9 10. Rxe8+ Kf9 11. Re6 Kf8 12. Rf6# 1-0

Have fun learning the endgames and enjoy your journey to XiangQi mastery!