Most beginners are convinced that double pawns are so bad that you will lose if you permit them to occur.
To be sure, there are plenty of situations in which doubled pawns are weak, but to convince you that you will not necessarily lose such games, I present nineteen games that involve quadrupled pawns!
Play over these games and review my annotations and see if your opinion of these “weak” pawns doesn’t change just a little bit.
To stop the pawns, the defender usually needs quickly to organize a battery of rooks and/or a queen shooting straight down the file on which the pawns are located.
If the quadrupled pawns cannot quickly be captured, the pawns control many key squares on the adjacent files, in many cases a large swath of the board!
As the defender, even down a pawn or two, it would be easy to overestimate your chances in these positions. Hopefully, playing through these games will convince you to think about doubled and tripled pawns in a new light. I have included full scores of these games and annotated many in their entirety so that you will actually see and understand how these formations formed.
Unlike many other inexpensive chess e-books, these are fully annotated in understandable, simple language. The profuse use of diagrams make these among the first chess books that you can read WITHOUT A BOARD at your side.
Jon Edwards won the 10th United States Correspondence Championship in 1997 and the 8th North American Invitational Correspondence Chess Championship in 1999.
To be sure, there are plenty of situations in which doubled pawns are weak, but to convince you that you will not necessarily lose such games, I present nineteen games that involve quadrupled pawns!
Play over these games and review my annotations and see if your opinion of these “weak” pawns doesn’t change just a little bit.
To stop the pawns, the defender usually needs quickly to organize a battery of rooks and/or a queen shooting straight down the file on which the pawns are located.
If the quadrupled pawns cannot quickly be captured, the pawns control many key squares on the adjacent files, in many cases a large swath of the board!
As the defender, even down a pawn or two, it would be easy to overestimate your chances in these positions. Hopefully, playing through these games will convince you to think about doubled and tripled pawns in a new light. I have included full scores of these games and annotated many in their entirety so that you will actually see and understand how these formations formed.
Unlike many other inexpensive chess e-books, these are fully annotated in understandable, simple language. The profuse use of diagrams make these among the first chess books that you can read WITHOUT A BOARD at your side.
Jon Edwards won the 10th United States Correspondence Championship in 1997 and the 8th North American Invitational Correspondence Chess Championship in 1999.
