Michael Healey on when to take an apparently free pawn – and, more important, when not to. Photograph by Roddy Mcgillivray
Before the start of a chess game I feel like giving an inspirational speech to the pieces: “We’re all going into battle together, and some of us might not live to see the end of it. Especially you little guys!”
I absolutely love sacrificing pawns. Opening up lines, gaining momentum, it puts all the obligation to calculate and defend and re-coordinate on the opponent. If your opponent has choking pressure on you it can suddenly be relieved with a pawn sacrifice, and the change of character from static to dynamic will completely throw some players. Sometimes you accidentally miss a pawn dropping and it turns out to be accidentally brilliant. Plus your opponent takes so much time thinking about whether the grab is “on” that it can be worth it long term. If there are enough open lines (and knights) something will usually turn up in the eternity that extra pawn takes to cross the board, and you get to look cool doing so; but it’s incredibly lazy.
Looking over grandmaster games in recent years, it seems that many games turn on taking or not taking a pawn. Oftentimes this appears to be a notable and critical decision in a game, assigned either a dramatic ! or ??; moreover it seems the pawn captures are almost always the ??s. A player like me has to force himself to take a pawn; being material up is complete anathema, especially if one loses that ethereal concept of the initiative.
Intuitively I believe most pawn grabs only lead to trouble. Yet some players have to restrain themselves from snatching pawns. Pawns make prizes after all. Some pawns look ripe for plucking; others look most poisonous. Most of the time we’re all trusting years of built-up intuition, because the consequences can be very hard to assess. Sometimes it comes down to a matter of taste. Unless you’re a computer – or a grandmaster.
As a chess teacher, my main experience of pawn grabbing is gut-wrenching – seeing queens en prise turned down while pawns are gobbled, or watching stalemate after stalemate when players refuse to win by checkmate. Yet to become a strong player pawn grabbing is a necessary skill, one might even say an art.
One player I really should have studied more by now is Victor Korchnoi (indeed website editor Stephen Moss and GM Vladislav Tkachiev gave me Chess Is My Life many years ago for defeating the latter in a simul). Korchnoi was notorious for snatching pawns, calculating and defending tenaciously whilst he voraciously gathered those loose crumbs. Such is the attitude of someone who survived the siege of Leningrad – take nourishment where you can get it, and enjoy doing so! Here he snacks on Fischer’s pawns and pieces to victory:
The most famous pawn grab of all time is probably Fischer’s 29…Bxh2 from game one of the 1972 world title match against Spassky:
The analysis and psychology of that move have been pored over ever since. Possibly Fischer was trying to prove he could play unbelievably and still draw. An ordinary chess mortal would just say – “Nope, not taking that one.” A genius attempts the impossible.
The youngest wave of supergrandmasters have grown up with supercomputers – computers like pawns, and can swat away emotional attacks with cold calculation. Modern grandmasters have seen enough computer lines to give them confidence to do the same. They are prepared to do the incredibly hard work of defending because, like computers, they are so very good at it. Here a tiny Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa coolly takes on f6 and faces down Gawain Jones’ vicious attack:
A game from the recent Women’s World Championship had a big effect on me. It was very much a fire and ice match: Tan Zhongyi tried to complicate and produce chaos whenever possible; Ju Wenjun was cool and calm at all times:
On move 20 of game 5 Ju Wenjun, with White, has a beautiful position – a pawn up and everything looks pretty rosy. Suddenly she snatches a pawn on a6. There is a short-term tactic making the move possible (Bxa6 Qxa6 Bxc5 Qc4+), but she is willing to suffer the de-coordinating of her pieces and opening of lines for her opponent for a mere weak isolated pawn when she already has an edge. There is of course a deeper point – to defang the dangerous bishop at b7 pointing at White’s king. The move looked horrific to my eyes, but Ju Wenjun goes with the “ugly” pawn capture. She went on to win an incredibly calm game (and the match).
However there was also a moment earlier in the game where the unnatural but best move was not to take the pawn:
Here Ju Wenjun captured with bxc3, whereas the incredibly brave Qd4 promises far more. The queen is centralised and primed for kingside attack, but joins the king on the pinned diagonal from a7 to g1. The c3 pawn is a bystander, unwilling to capture on b2 for fear of adding the c1 bishop to the attack. A human winces, a computer shrugs. The best move is the best move.
In the recent Alexander Cup Final I had an extremely tough battle with Guildford’s Clive Frostick. The game itself is very interesting, played to a fairly high standard, only suffering towards the end from time trouble-induced dubious moves (and the distractions of two fascinating games either side, on boards 5 and 7). It was a very unusual game for me (not least because I’m playing a new opening this season) where I tried to refrain from complications and play calmly for as long as possible (alas, I failed). The theme seemed to be the question of pawn grabbing: could pawns be grabbed, and more importantly should they be? Here are 12 positions from the game. Please have a quick ponder of each and judge whether you would snatch or not.
Diagram 1: 7…Nxe5
Diagram 2: 12. Bxd5 exd5 13. Qxd5
Diagram 3: (Analysis move 15…Na6) 16. Bxb7
Diagram 4: 17…Bxb2
Diagram 5: 18…Bxa3
Diagram 6: 22…Bxa3
Diagram 7: 23. Bxa3
Diagram 8: 33. Bxc6 Qxc6 34. Qxa7
Diagram 9: 34. Qxa7
Diagram 10: 36. Qxa5
Diagram 11: 40. Bxb7
Diagram 12: 41. Bxb7
Are we all ready? Hands ready to grab? On to the game!
A sad end to a good game, which White really deserved to win. One spectator summarised my own game to me as I took one pawn, then another, and I was never really in trouble. I think we’ve put paid to that. It also serves as a lesson to us all in pawn grabbing. By my count, of the 12 possible pawn captures in the diagrams, five were for Black, seven for White; eight were incorrect and only four were correct captures (diagrams 4, 5, 7 and 9). Of the 11 possible captures (one was from later analysis), the players chose correctly on nine occasions. Not bad for board six of an evening match!
