Knowing
Good and Bad
Students don 't pay much attention to pawn structures when they are starting out. They don 't have to. They usually play standard openings, such as the Ruy Lopez, Queen 's Gambit Declined, Giuoco Piano, and the Sicilian, NimzoIndian, King's Indian and Queen 's Indian Defenses, and so on. Each of these leaves you off, after I 0 or so moves, with a more or less familiar pawn structure that is also more or less even . But when the middlegame begins, the structure begins to matter because either side can change it. A master not only knows what a good one looks like, but what to do about a bad one.
Structured Study
How do you master pawn structures? The simplest way is to go over annotated games with different structures and figure out which structures are good, which are bad and which fa ll in between . It's important to work with annotated games because good notes - that is, notes with words, not just moves - reveal a lot of subtleties you might otherwise miss.
Pawns and Priyomes
Obtaining the pawn structure you want to play is typically the first step of a two-step process. The equally important second step is knowing how to exploit it. The Russians gave us a word - priyome - to describe the technique that is appropriate for a particular pawn structure. You already know some of these even if you've never heard of the word priyome. Suppose you 're playing a rook endgame with seven pawns apiece . There is one open file. The priyome is simply to seize control of the file with your rook. It's virtually an automatic, no-think move for most players and it typically obtains an advantage. Most priyomes are much more sophisticated than that. They are both tactical and strategic . They can provide you with just a hint of what the next move should be. Or they can hand you a full-blown middlegame script, leading almost to mate. Here 's an elaborate priyome that became familiar in the last 20 years and defeated some of the strongest players.
Counter-P riyome Some priyomes are so sophisticated that they have inspired specific antidotes - a kind of counter-priyome. Here 's a pair of illustrations. In the first case the priyome succeeds perfectly. In the second it is fo il ed by a counterpriyome.
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