Pawn Breakthroughs - Principles of Chess Endgames

“One of the principal requisites of good chess is the ability to treat both middle and end game equally well.”

- Aron Nimzowitsch.

As you start your chess voyage, some matches are straightforward checkmates. Whereas, Some games come to a few pawns and pieces. I have discussed pawn structure and pawn break in this blog,

https://www.chess.com/blog/siddharth026/mastering-pawn-structure-and-pawn-breaks

Today we will see the physical in-game application of these pawn breaks. Let's understand this from the analysis below,

Game 1-

Now to start, I am going to teach you the approach to solving this kind of puzzle.
So in this puzzle, as you see,

Step 1-
white has great space control and more chance to break out and create passed pawns. So it is better for white. ( Understanding position )

Step 2- 
Here you have to answer the question, What is black best move after any of my moves? This will help you identify the threat. 
Here black will try to play b5 and create the threat of his own passed pawn. 

Step 3- 
Continue the question by asking can I stop it? Yes, I can. So what if I used what I learnt from Siddharth's blog and break? Try to break the structure first.
With these steps, Now we will understand the breaks we can make here.

We can see there are two breaks here. According to Siddharth, I have to play f5, but what if I play g5? 
Then the answer is simple that will be a drawing endgame.

After this, there is no pawn push for white on the right side of the board.

So how does f5 win? Here is how,

This was the Easy way. If Black is a good player, he knows taking is not always good, So he can play ke5 after g5.

Wait, I can't see a win, Are you lying here? 

No, here you have to understand the concept of zugzwang. I stopped here intentionally since most of us cannot calculate all lines. Once I helped you by telling concept, Knowing what you will play will be easy. 

Zugzwang -

Zugzwang is a German word that means, "It is your turn to move, and all of your moves are bad!" There is no "pass" or "skip a move" in chess, so sometimes having to move can loss of the game!

In our position, King is in Zugzwang. So any king move will result in the promotion of our pawn and our victory. So our job is simple we have to trade everything on the left side and then his king has to move.

There is one more reply here which I will show you now,

Now where is a win here? What moves should you play?

Here you have two concepts to play one is to create a Zugzwang and the second is to create multiple passers.

Game 2-

This is an advanced-level concept now. As I said in the first game, We have to start asking questions to ourselves. The first question is, what does black want? Black knows he is less in moves. His only hope is to draw a game else, If g pawn pushes, then h pawn should promote.
 
The second question is, what do we have? And it's nothing at this point?
But we have to play something. So we try to avoid the Black threat of the h pawn and try to push our right side pawn.
The third question is, what move does Black want to play when our king moves?

If you guessed it, Yes the move is d4. As a result, we first play c3. To avoid Kd4. Make sure to note Black doesn't have any moves. His king will be in Zugzwang.

Now the game can move in two directions from here both in the same pattern and resulting win for white.

Pattern 1-

Pattern 2-

Game 2 was only to make you understand the concept of questing in the position where the position seems to be tough and drawish. This will help you identify the correct move you should play. I can challenge you, Send this position to your friend. They will not play c3 at the start. At least most of them.

Game 3-

This blog would never be complete if we are considering chess pawn structure studies and, we did not involve GM Garry Kasparov's study here.

So here is a Garry Kasparov match. Let's see, can you guess the moves?

This game is more the less a drawing endgame even Stockfish declares it as 0.00. Even after that, Garry wins this since he plays the best moves. Let's see how he does it.
So the first step is easy to trade the queen and push the king ahead and create a d5 break.

The game continued for a few more moves and his opponent resigned since Garry will take pawns and promote a new queen.

But Siddharth, you said it's 0.00 according to Stockfish then where is the draw? 
For this purpose, I used this match here. This move is not easy to find, even at a GM level. 
Move where his opponent's blunder was,
Kf6.

So then what is the move?
Apparently, Kf4 was a great move. Idea is to reach the pawn from behind.
How? This is the way,

Or even like this,

Believe it or not, we never would think that pawns can be captured even by moving from backwards in the endgame.

This was all for today's learning session. We have seen several concepts and ways to reach out to the position in front of you. To conclude the start of any chess theory begins by asking the question. The better your question is, the better your understanding of chess will be.
I hope you will love this blog and comment if you want more of this theoretical understanding of various concepts.
Till then let all of us grow at chess together.

The End