Today's Daily Puzzle 9/29/20: Push Pawns, Weaken King

Happy Tuesday Puzzlers! We're currently in the easier part of the week and below I have the past three days of puzzles. I try to come up with a lesson or theme from the daily puzzle and today's puzzle really emphasizes the issues with pushing your kingside pawns, particularly if you don't have a bishop to cover up the squares you weaken.

It's often said that every pawn push you make simultaneously weakens the squares you leave behind (because pawns can't go backwards, the squares that were defended are now permanently undefended) and strengthens new squares. However, when pushing your kingside pawns, that trade-off is usually negative: you're weakening your king and the squares you gain are not likely where the action is.

If you see your opponent with weak kingside squares, find ways to exploit them particularly be placing your knights/bishops/queen on squares that threaten the weakened squares. In today's daily puzzle, black's pawn on g6 has permanently weakened h6 and g6 (note black's dark squared bishop is gone which doesn't help).

White's queen is in a particularly good spot to exploit this weakness, but white will have to bring in more pieces to really emphasize the problems that black has!

The moral of today's puzzle? Don't push your kingside pawns unless absolutely necessary! How did you do today? Comment below!

Yesterday's Puzzle

Have a quick look at yesterday's puzzle with some quick commentary. Not much to analyze on this one as the correct variation is so forcing:

Sunday's Daily Puzzle:

Link here.