Simple Chess: When Pawns Attack!

Round 1 of Tuesday Night Action 33 started on my birthday. I was paired against a player I have yet to find a way to beat. However, I was up for the task and looked forward to the game. Even though I lost this game (spoiler alert) I was pleased with how I handled the pushing of the pawns towards my king. It is something that I have struggled with coming up through the ranks. The previous me would have panicked and pushed one or two pawns way sooner in an effort to stop the enemy pawns, only to create weaknesses in my camp. Here is the game:


I attribute several things to helping minimize the fear when I see pawns coming at me. The first thing is getting better at tactics as this will allow you to keep an eye out for spots where something could come crashing through. Even if you don't know exactly how to handle the attack at least being tactically strong will allow you to know if there is something to fear or if you have a great defensive resource.

The next thing that has helped me calm down during pawn storms is studying a lot of games that deal with attacks on the castled king. Two books specifically include, The King in Jeopardy and Art of Attack in Chess. 

The third thing is going over my own games when I allowed a pawn storm to come crashing through. I put all of my games into Chessbase afterwards and try to annotate them with my thoughts. At the very least I usually put in the variations that I was thinking of during the game that didn't happen. This allows me to play back through and see what changes I could have done.

In fact, this last one when used after getting better at tactics and learning the principles of attack and defense, has become the best way.

While I understand that everyone isn't going to dish out the money for Chessbase and/or a Mega Database, I do highly recommend it to the serious adults that want to improve. In fact, instead of buying book after book after book you can have any information you want whenever you want it.

For example, take my game you just played through when I have it in Chessbase I can look for similar pawn structures to see how other games were played.

Looking for games that have a similar pawn structure to find out how these structures can be handled. 

Alright, so we just asked the Chessbase software to find games with a similar structure and here are the results (25 games):

I put all 25 games into a database that I can review later. 

I haven't gone through any of the games in detail just yet. However, I sorted the games by whether White wins or Black wins. What I noticed is that if Black can lock down the pawns near his king while pushing his pawns on the queen side and in the center then he will usually win or at least draw. However, if White is able to get through because of Black pushes pawns and creating weaknesses on the king side then White is usually the victor.

It is all about building a knowledge bank to help yourself in the future. There isn't a single book out there than can do this like Chessbase.



Key Lessons From This Game:

-Keep pushing my initiative to keep the pressure up. If I had broken through on the queen side then that weakness plus the weakness of White's king probably would have been too much for him to hold.

-Have better time management. This includes doing a better job of knowing my opening's ideas and plans to avoid costly minutes lost at the start of the game. After 16 moves I had used 55 minutes of my 75 minutes that I started with or almost 3.5 minutes per move.

-Trust your calculations when low on time don't just discard them because you think you saw that something was miscalculated. Spend the extra 5-10 seconds when you have 2-3 minutes to verify your work.