The Pawn-verse. Backwards pawns EP 1

What are pawns? There is no better description that puts it simply and best than that given by the great Philidor.   “Pawns are the soul of chess”’ Without the smallest chessmen there is no army, there is no battlefield. Thus, it is a topic of great importance.

Pawn formations generally dictate where the pieces ought to go. The pieces need to abide by the patterns formed by the pawns and allocate themselves in the most useful squares where they can exert the most force and be effective in achieving the overall objective of the game.

This will be one of many posts in the series of our journey into the Pawn-Verse and how to understand these chessmen and their overall contribution to the game.  (Cheesy right? I called them this because I feel it to be the perfect amount of appropriate. They deserve their own diligent attention)

There are many pawn themes that exists like (IQP) Isolated Queen Pawn, hanging pawn couples, Pawn islands, Passed Pawns (Everyone’s Favorite- yes, we do love queening ) I CHOSE TO START here because this theme is the most recurring in my games.

I play e4 and face a lot of Sveshnikov Sicilian, I am a Kings Indian defense player and amongst that my other weapons include the Grunfeld Defense and Benko/Benoni (When I am high on caffeine of course).

Let’s now define what are Backward pawns:

It goes both ways for white and black but for these illustrative purposes, we’ll look at it from black having these backward pawns.

These are pawns that are normally on their home square (7th rank) or the 6th rank but beyond that they are usually over extended, lose or pawn islands and generally transform into other pawn themes.

Benoni/Benko pawn structure

Sicilian Sveshnikov

This is important because they may inform the strategic approach with which a player must treat the underlying position in the game. There are strategic elements that must be considered as well as dynamic elements:

STRATEGIC Elements:

·         Weak square in front of the backward pawn

·         The weakness of the pawn itself

DYNAMIC elements:

·         Passivity (Lack of piece activity as they must be defended

·         Peace mobility (Pieces are usually cramped

·         Space (Less space)

·         Initiative (for the better side)

These will be considered in detail throughout the series and illustrations from my very own games and Classical games played by GRANDMASTERS.

Backward pawns are by no means A TABOO MUST NOT HAVE structure but have both their weaknesses and strengths and the aim in this series is to try venture into both and unlock the underlying truths and exceptions to this phenomenon.

To keep this article short and sweet, I will cover at least 1 grandmaster game and the rest will be covered in an in-depth video at the end that you can find a link to.