Open up any book on how to improve at chess and one of the first things it will emphasize is that you need to understand typical pawn structures that arise from the openings you play. This is good advice, but when I started out in the early 1970s books offering this sort of information were few and dated. Hans Kmoch's Pawn Power in Chess, which appeared in the 1950s, was probably the first book to deal extensively with the topic of different types of pawn structures. It was an original work, but filled with jargon and mainly covered Ruy Lopez and Benoni type structures. Middlegame works by Euwe/Kramer and Pachman were helpful if you wanted to master the Minority Attack in the Queen's Gambit Declined, but not terribly useful for openings that had come to the fore after the Second World War. In 1976, Andrew Soltis broke new ground with his Pawn Structure Chess. This book was arranged by opening and did a good job of providing the reader with a solid grounding in the basics.

Twenty-five years later students of the game have a lot more specialized works to choose from. The Ukrainian publisher Intelinvest Co. Ltd. (distributed in North America by International Chess Enterprises) has produced entire books on hanging pawns and isolated queen pawns alone. Soltis' book by comparison, which tried to offer a little bit on everything, only offers nine pages on the IQP. Putting this into comparison, Grandmaster Alex Baburin's Winning Pawn Structures, which deals almost exclusively with the IQP, offers 204 pages on this commonly occurring and difficult to master structure. Baburin's book, which is really excellent, was published by Batsford Press, which has ongoing royalty disputes with many of its authors. I can't recommend this book at the present time as GM Baburin has asked people not to buy it!

A new offering in the field is Understanding Pawn Play in Chess by GM Drazen Marovic. Understanding Pawn Play in Chess is not as detailed or specialized as Baburin's book, but for the average player up to 2400 FIDE it has much to recommend it. The Croatian GM, who received well-deserved praise for his opening repertoire books in the 70s and 80s, has a gift for explaining things. In his present work he uses over 130 well-annotated games to cover not only the IQP, but also hanging pawns, passed pawns, double pawns, backward pawns, pawn chains, and pawn islands. Marovic primarily annotates with words and not variations. This is not the book to check if you want the ultimate truth to a certain game, but Marovic's telling comments are much more likely to stick with the average student than reams of variations.

The material in this book covers a wide time frame. The classics of Capablanca and Rubinstein are here as well as contemporary examples by Kasparov and Karpov. Marovic, who developed in the 1960s as a player, has chosen quite a few lesser-known games from that decade. Some well-known model games are so instructive that they can't help but appear in every new book touching on the IQP (for example game nine of the 1981 World Championship match between Kortchnoi and Karpov), but much of the material in Understanding Pawn Play in Chess is fresh.

You can't expect any book to answer all your questions. One that I didn't get answered by Marovic (or Baburin) comes from the game Botvinnik-Zagoriansky, Sverdlovsk 1943, which is regularly trotted out as a model example of Nimzovich's theory of playing against two weaknesses. True to form, when annotating this game Marovic uses more words to describe what's happening, while Baburin gives more concrete variations, but both pass over 18...h6. This natural looking effort to create some "luft" may be the losing move as it creates a target for White to open the kingside. At the least it makes the first player's job much easier.

(1) M Botvinnik - E Zagoriansky [A13]
Sverdlovsk Sverdlovsk (6), 1943
1.Nf3 d5 2.c4 e6 3.b3 Nf6 4.Bb2 Be7 5.e3 0-0 6.Nc3 c5 7.cxd5 Nxd5 8.Nxd5 exd5 9.d4 cxd4 10.Qxd4 Bf6 11.Qd2 Nc6 12.Be2 Be6 13.0-0 Bxb2 14.Qxb2 Qa5 15.Rfd1 Rad8 16.Rd2 Rd7 17.Rad1 Rfd8 18.h3 h6 (?) 19.Ne5 Nxe5 20.Qxe5 Qc5 21.Bf3 b6 22.Qb2 Rc8 23.Qe5 Rcd8 24.Rd4 a5

Botvinnik is clearly better, but is unable to put more pressure to bear on d5. How does he cash in on his considerable positional advantage?

25.g4!!

The opening of a second front proves too much for the tied up Black defenders.

25...Qc6 26.g5 hxg5 27.Qxg5 f6 28.Qg6 Bf7 29.Qg3 f5 30.Qg5 Qe6 31.Kh1 Qe5 32.Rg1 Rf8 33.Qh6 Rb8 34.Rh4 Kf8 35.Qh8+ Bg8 36.Rf4 Rbb7 37.Rg5 Rf7 38.Qh5 Qa1+ 39.Kg2 g6 40.Qxg6 Bh7 41.Qd6+ Rfe7 42.Qd8+ 1-0

Understanding Pawn Play in Chess, which features the superior production values typical of Gambit Publication books, can be recommended without reservation to all players between 1800-2200 and even those up to 2400 will find much of interest.

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