Pawn Storms
We all know the importance of castling. It provides a very easy way of developing the rooks while also sheltering the king behind a series of pawns. Unfortunately, though, this goes both ways. Our opponents can also castle, protecting their king and making it harder for us to checkmate. We can try to disrupt the safety of the opponent’s castled king through a tactic called “pawn storming.”
Let’s go over the actual moves involved in pawn storming first. Pawn storming is simply when we move up the pawns on the same side as the opponent’s king to attack. For example, to use a pawn storm in the position above, white would just move up the f, g, and h pawns until they’re attacking the pawns in front of the black king. Then, white will just trade pawns with black. Our goal is to get a situation like below.
Here, by looking at the f, g, and h files, we can see that black will be forced to trade, meaning that white can completely open up the black king for attack. We can see that after the trade, black will be in a bad position. White has its queen, rook, and dark squared bishop ready to apply pressure, and it’ll likely be an easy victory. It is very important to realize that before pawn storming, white has adequate control over the center; if it didn’t, it would be very easy for black to counter-push and win.
Author: Priyanshu Alluri