The power of the pawn

For sure pawns are important! In the begining they determine the if the game will be open or not, so they are deciding which will be stronger your knights or bishops. Their position practically determines the mid-game. In the mid-game they should be progressing forward, determining board control, providing you room and shutting down your opponent, determining who will queen and who will not. In the end game they finally become your queen, but only if you played them well begining and mid-game.

I think that too many people over look their importance. They are not the greatest piece, but I think in using them correctly they are the hardest piece to understand. That being said, I guess that's just a small piece of the greater puzzle.

I'm still struggling to understand them correctly, I'll go read the book mentioned above. Cheers for the reference Marshal_Dillon. =)

Im very happy with this forum, because the opinions i read until now make me believe that pawns are really "the soul of chess" and a piece(8 of them) that is really decisive, when well used, to improve our quality of game.

JWilson--

"They are not the greatest piece, but I think in using them correctly they are the hardest piece to understand."

I agree.  I know I have lost games because I have pushed a pawn when I should have left it alone, or when I have used a pawn to capture when I should have pushed it.  One little square of influence changes the whole board.  Maybe it's because the pawn's influence is so small that it is the hardest to understand.

Oh!! How many games ive lost by the same reasons...

How many master games do we see a pawn move in the annotations e5! or f7! There is a game by Alekhine in which he just sacrifices his pieces to push pawns. He has black and every pawn push is marked by a ! The point is that pawns arn't just pawns and have to be understood dynamically as does every piece on the board. There are continual debates about N's v B's, whats better? In some games you will see statements like 'this N is worth a Rook'. Now the great book by Nimozowitsch 'My System' has a whole chapter on pawns. He conjured up the term 'the passed pawn's lust to expand'. This may seem strange, how can a pawn 'lust' it's just a piece? In actuallity all the pieces on the board represent, within the context of the rules of the game, extensions of the thoughts of the players. We all feel it while we're playing 'I want to push that pawn'. With every move forward the pawn becomes more dangerous. Their influence changes the dynamic of the whole position. We should know that a R is useless against 2 connected passed pawns on the sixth rank and so on. A pawn on the seventh rank about to promote is something impossible to ignore. Pawns with R's behaind them 'transmit' the power of the R's. All the pieces dynamically interact. Neither can things be seen materially, one pawn can be unimportant another critical to the position. Hence the warnings against grabing pawns by a roving Q approaching an ending. How many players have grabbed a R pawn with a Q only to lose an ending because it was more important to keep the Q centralised.

A bit of a rant but the thing to hold on to is all pieces are important but the actuall concrete importance or dynamic potential depends on the REAL POSITION on the board.  

thanks bruciebaby

In the 19th century, pawns were regarded as unimportant and were freely sacrificed so that pieces could be developed more easily and you could go for the opponent's king with the heavy artillery. Nowadays, chess is about getting small advantages, often with pawns, and converting them into a win.

In most of my games, where neither I nor my opponent makes a real mistake, and there are no decisive mating attacks, pieces are traded off until there is an endgame with pawns and one or two pieces per side. The side with the best pawn structure wins.

They are the heart of the game.

Here goes another game (strange, i think):

Here it goes a game in wich at the endgame pawns made all the difference:

Oh !!! This forum is dead

Here it goes something Paul Keres said :

 The older I grow, the more I value Pawns!