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Finding the Proper Pawn Break for the Beginner / Intermediate Player || #AskAChessMaster Show

Finding the Proper Pawn Break for the Beginner / Intermediate Player || #AskAChessMaster Show

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Hello, everyone! This is my first blog post on chess.com and I am proud to present you this new series I will be creating called the #AskAChessMaster show, in which you guys give me your questions, and I will answer them!

Today's question comes from TaylorD and his question is, "which pawn should I use to create a pawn break?" This is an important and very good question to have, especially when one is starting to grasp the easier ideas in chess, like controlling the centre and the like.

The great Philidor once said, "Pawns are the soul of chess", which I totally agree on.  Moving a single pawn can be the difference between winning a game, or losing one. In today's question, I will be answering how to determine which pawn to push in a chess game and when.

To do this, we need to first understand what a "pawn break" is. A pawn break in chess occurs when we move a pawn ahead to attack one of our opponent's pawns, in the hopes that they either take our pawn or move forwards with their pawn. Look at the example below.

The move pawn d5 is a pawn break as black does not want white to have a strong pawn on e4!
To determine when a pawn break is needed, we need to first determine in any given position, which pawn on our opponent's side do we find annoying and that we want to get rid of. When we find the pawn that we do not like (in the example above, it is the white e4 pawn), we need to determine which of the two pawns we would like to use to distract it. In the position above, only the d and f pawn are available, but we surely do not want to use our f-pawn as that would weaken our king. Thus, d5 is a pawn break that is much better for us in that position as black.
Thus, the two steps of finding a pawn break is simple.
1. Determine which pawn we do not like in our opponent's position.
2. Determine which pawn we wish to use to get rid of said pawn.

If you want a more complicated example in a real game, I go more into depth in this video I have on my youtube channel "SL Chess Development"!

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