The Dagger

One of the most important factors in chess is pawn structure. When you play an opening what you are doing is setting up a specific pawn structure and when you play positionally you are largely basing your play on pawn structure. Thus you need to know about the pawn sturctures that arise in the openings that you use as well as the pawn structures that may arise during the course of the game. One of the elements of the pawn structure that many people are not familiar with is what I call "The Dagger." This is a pawn that sits on 66 when playing white and g3 when playing black. With the dagger in place we can deliver a fatal blow by brining in the queen. Below is an example game. If anyone has further examples please do send them in.