Dropping pawns

Players below 1600 are relaxed about pawns. Players above 1800 are not, and the difference is not that they count better. They have lost enough rook endgames a pawn down to know what a pawn is worth: with the pieces off, one pawn is often the only thing that separates a win from a draw, or a draw from a loss.

The pattern page shows the tag holding steady across rating bands while hanging pieces fall away. Pawns are the mistake that survives improvement.

Where pawns go

Three places, in order of frequency:

1. A pawn left with no defender. Same as a piece, same counting, same fix. The most common victim is a centre pawn whose defender just moved away.

2. A pawn defended by a piece that cannot recapture. Pinned, overloaded, or about to be traded off. This is the pin article again: a defender that is pinned counts as zero. The Steinitz position there is a textbook pawn loss. The pawn on e5 looked covered twice.

3. A pawn you pushed. Every pawn move makes the pawn easier to attack and impossible to take back. Pawns that advance without a reason arrive on squares where they need a piece to hold them, and the piece has better things to do. The tag for this is still drops a pawn, but the mistake was two moves earlier.

The pawns that are always in danger

Some pawns need watching the whole game, and it saves time to know which:

• Isolated pawns (no friendly pawn on either neighbouring file). They can only ever be defended by pieces, and a piece tied to a pawn is a piece not playing.
• Backward pawns (behind their neighbours, on a half-open file). The square in front of them is a hole; the pawn itself is a target on the file.
• The pawn in front of your castled king after you have pushed it. h3 is luft; h4 is a target.
• The a- and b-pawns after your rook leaves the file. Queenside pawns get taken by a bishop or a queen on a long diagonal more than anything else.

“It is only a pawn”

The sentence is worth a paragraph because it is what players actually think at the moment they drop one. Two things are true:

First, at 1200 it is often true. A pawn down with all the pieces on, you will have twenty more chances. Playing on with confidence is right.

Second, the habit of not caring is what costs you later. The player who learns to hold pawns at 1200 is the one who wins endgames at 1700. The player who learns “it is only a pawn” has to unlearn it.

So: play on, but count it as a mistake. Tag it, repair it, and next time it is a pawn you kept.

The tell

A pawn with exactly one defender, or a pawn that you just moved. And any pawn defended by a piece that is pinned or has two jobs.

The habit

Extend the hanging-piece question to pawns: "After this move, what of mine can be taken, including pawns?" And before every pawn push, one more: "Who defends it when it gets there?" If the answer is a piece that would rather be elsewhere, the push is probably wrong.