How to Pawn Storm and Win Your Chess Games! || Improve Your Chess || Chess Strategy

NM Sneakiest_Of_Snakes

Aug 3, 2020, 4:08 PM | 6

You have all heard of pawn storms. It's simply the process of moving up pawns in the hopes of attacking the opponent's king!

While that may be partially true, like most truths, it doesn't cover the full story. In today's blog post, I will be showing you all the do's and don't of pawn storms as well as learning the in's and out's of when to actually do one!

So when should we actually perform a pawn storm in chess? Is it whenever we feel like it? Is it whenever we have an urge to go for an all-out attack? If you answer yes to any of the above two questions, you would unfortunately, most definitely, be wrong.

Pawn storms generally come up when two things come up.

1. Kings are castled on opposite sides of the board (King's Indian attack is an exception but beyond the scope of this lesson)

2. The centre is closed

While most people are aware about the first bullet-point, most people are not aware of the second point. Why must the centre be closed (or at least hard to open up)? The reason is quite simple. While you're busting open your opponent's king, it would be quite unfortunate if your opponent was able to break through in the centre to attack your king! Let me show you a silly but obvious example of why this is the case.

While white might be having the time of his life with his pawn storm on the black king, he's unfortunately in quite the pickle here as the centre is completely blown open making it easy for his OWN king to become susceptible to attacks from all directions (Even if the white king was on the queenside, things would be looking kind of questionable for him).

Thus the first do, is to do a pawn storm if the centre is closed, but don't do one if it is completely open.

The second do in today's lesson is all about doing pawn breaks when it lives up to its name. What do I mean? I mean do a pawn break if it breaks open the opponent's position. Don't do a pawn break if it just allows your opponent to push their own pawn forwards causing it to break your own pawn storm and halt it in it's path. What do I mean? Check out this following position.

In this position, it is white to move. You have the option of pushing a pawn to g6 and h6 (might not be the best moves in the position, but imagine you are forced to move one of them), which pawn break would you choose?

If you chose g6, that is absolutely the better pawn break as h6 would just allow the black pawn to move to g6, stopping your attacks altogether.

Hope you all learned something today! For a more in depth analysis, as well as a picturesque example of a pawn storm from a game between two past world championship, make sure to watch the video below!

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How to Pawn Storm and Win Your Chess Games! || Improve Your Chess || Chess Strategy

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