In chess you cannot take your move back, but you can always return a misplaced piece to its former square at the cost of some time. Pawns on the other hand can never move backwards, making pawn moves truly permanent decisions.

This irreversibility makes Pawn Play among the most difficult aspects of chess strategy, which is one reason few books have been written about this topic – and some that have are almost incomprehensible. Double Olympiad gold medallist Sam Shankland has gone the other way – breaking down the principles of Pawn Play to basic, easily understandable guidelines every chess player should know. Shankland starts with extremely simple examples, but then lifts the level, illustrating the universality of the book’s guidelines by showing how grandmasters could have made better decisions by using them.

Writing a book came to mind. Not because I was worried I would have to someday do this because of a bet. Or because of money. I simply thought writing a book would help me improve my own chess, by offering a chance to investigate in detail a subject that I felt I did not understand as well as I should. Selfish as my original purposes were, a successful book that helps a lot of
people improve their chess would be a very pleasant side effect of my studies!

I chose the topic of pawn play because I have always struggled to explain the nature of good pawn play to my students, and struggled to make sense when it came up in interviews. I noticed that even when I would rate a pawn move as poor, or criticize someone for not making a pawn move they should have made, I had a hard time explaining why. Even when your evaluation is correct, telling someone “that move is wrong because I said so” offers very little instructional value.

It occurred to me that I did not consciously understand pawn play well, even if I had a good feel for how to play with pawns. So, I studied a lot of games where pawns were mismanaged, and have come up with some guidelines that explain both when a pawn move is good and when it is bad.

It is essential for players of all levels to study pawn play to become better. Pawns constitute half of the bits you are given at the beginning; and the way they are structured often dictates how the pieces can interact with each other. Not surprisingly, the evaluation of the position can change massively with a bad pawn move.