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People think pawns are worthless in chess.
I mean, alright, perhaps a pawn isn't worth a knight, bishop, rook or queen, but that goes both ways, right? No-one wants their special pieces being taken by pawns, and therefore pawns are excellent for area denial. Two pawns, side-by-side, can lock off four places in the row ahead. They're also an excellent counter to bishops.
Pawns aren't really very good when it comes to aggression, true, but they're numerous, defend well and punish mistakes. The fact that they're worth less than anything else on the board also makes them ideal sacrificial pieces. Or they can be error control; one tactic is to place a knight, bishop or rook in a vulnerable position, but supported diagonally by a pawn. If your piece is taken (preferably by another valuable piece), then your pawn can take theirs, pretty much nullifying the value exchange and locking off that avenue of approach anyway. But this tactic really relies on your adversary seeing the pawn's position clearly, and not taking your valuable piece. The idea is to buy yourself a turn of safety to move a good piece into a stronger position and to have a way of cleaning up if your opponent decides to risk it.
Pawns are awesome.
Comments
Pawns are also common and have the potential to become stronger pieces if you're clever. Moving your pawns right means you can get much stronger pieces out quickly and control larger sections of the board.
By the way, I only play second edition.
Generally, the idea that pawns are worthless is what sets newbies apart from veterans. As I learned the hard way, pawn position makes or breaks games.
Also, this thread can be chess general.
Thoughts on using knights? I haven't quite mastered them yet (insofar as anything in chess can ever be mastered). Generally, I end up using them to chase the king around and be inconvenient for my opponent, but they're often the pieces I'm least worried about losing because of their limited denial. Sure, they can take just about any singular piece from a position of safety, but that's a late game strength.
I find Knights inconvenient, honestly. Their variable patterns make them harder for me to control and predict.
Jesus I haven't played Chess in forever.
The advantages of knights, in a way, is that they are less conspicuous, due to they unique movement patterns.
Knights have one unique property: they cannot be blocked. If a piece is threatened by a knight, it is forced to move, so they are useful for control.
By the same taken, though, knights can't continue to be threaten a moving piece unless they also continue to move. That's the thing that gets me in trouble.
Yeah, but that's where the other pieces come in.
To be honest, what I know about chess comes from being repeatedly beaten by much better players. Certainly though, underestimating any piece is the easiest way to lose.
I'll just leave this here.
I always stagger my pawns to make a wall where, if they take one piece, a pawn is going to take that one
My one issue with that strategy is that it prevents rooks from moving easily about and therefore providing their awesome denial.
I fucking love pawns. If you know how to advance them well, a wall of pawns is a force to be reckoned with.
"Pawns are the soul of chess" after all. But seriously, if you play chess on anything other than the "I am so new to this that I only know the basic rules of the game" level, you know that pawns are incredibly important. The pawn structure decides the nature of the match after all. Now, I'm not a particularly good chess player nor do I care that much for it, but even I know that. But then again my dad, who played competitively on a very high level in his younger days, used to play chess often with me and that is certainly one thing I quickly learned. Another likely bi-product of this though was making me not interested in chess at all, considering that I would only ever lose.
I always feel weird walking into chess discussions like this, because the whole time I was in high school my classmates expected me to be the kind of person who'd be awesome at chess, but I was fucking terrible at it.
I think the only halfway respectable shot I've ever taken at it was wasted on the Wizard's Chess minigame when my roommate rented Imagine: Janitorz Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Could not be seconded more; I am living proof that being smart does not in any way translate to being good at chess. I know all the rules of the game, even the relatively more complicated concepts like pawn structures and zugzwang and the hypermodern style, but I can't actually play to save my life because to win a game at any level you need to be reasonably good at not making mistakes, and I just can't do that.