Respect the little ones!

Hi!

Well, I would like to start by saying that DO NOT TRAVEL to Greece in July! I just returned from a small trip, and it was super hot there. It is a beautiful country to visit but NOT FOR SUMMERTIME. I'm getting older but NOT necessarily wiser. Anyway, let's speak about chess!

I've always been told that to become better at chess, it's just a matter of continually learning patterns. We can confirm this by the significant improvement we experienced at the beginning when we started learning all the main tactical patterns and were able to apply them in our games.

So you can apply the same idea to get better at strategy. If you want to improve in this skill, you need to get to know patterns as well. That is why today, I would mainly like to talk about the importance of understanding pawn structures and how you can identify them in your own games.

In order to get deeper in this topic, we'll look at some examples I have selected, where we see certain pawn structures repeated and the ideas for playing with them.

Pawn on a6 or a5?

Play G5!

The barrier

After seeing these examples, I hope you realize how important is to learn several pawn structures. As we learned today, pawns played a crucial role in our games, so we can agree with Philidor, who famously said: "Pawns are the soul of chess" especially in endgames.

Just remember, no matter your skill level or experience, respecting the little ones is a must. A single wrong pawn move can cost you the game.

See you around!