One small step for a pawn, one giant leap for the player
As pawns can only move forward, mastering how to use them is a vital skill in chess. Games at all levels are won and lost on pawn advances alone.
Double Olympiad gold medallist and 2018 US Champion GM Sam Shankland returns to Chessable with his second, fully-reappraised investigation into the often neglected subject of pawn play.
Building on the success of his first pawn structure course
When Shankland wrote the first part of this series,
Small Steps to Giant Improvement , he credited it to helping him reach the upper strata of GMs and winning the 2018 US Championship.
Small Steps 2 Success goes further into pawn structure study and
sheds light on the vital topic of passed pawns which - whether connected, lone, or protected - frequently crop up in middlegames and endgames.
While it builds upon the topics in the first course, it is a
great standalone course for anyone wanting to brush up on passed pawn play. GM Shankland's debut was all about pawns not being able to move backward, and seldom moving sideways, while this course deals with the polar opposite.
As the author argues, there are far more subtleties to passed pawns than simply getting them promoted. This course uncovers those game-winning ideas.
Almost every decisive game that is played that is not decided by a direct tactic or a direct attack will feature passed pawns in some way...
- GM Sam Shankland
With this course, you are bound to become more effective in playing with or against passed pawns.
Shankland breaks down each topic into a series of crystal-clear guidelines he believes have helped him improve and will help you boost your chess-playing abilities. You also get
more than 11 hours of video instruction synced along with the course.
GM Shankland has identified
three broad categories of passed pawns: connected passed pawns, lone passed pawns, and protected passed pawns.
You will learn to deal with these common occurrences as follows:
♟️
A focus on playing with and against connected passed pawns in the middlegame♟️
Learn to play with and against lone (isolated) passers in the middlegame♟️
Dedicated chapters on playing with and against protected passers in the middlegame♟️
Five chapters covering all the same kinds of passers in the endgame♟️
A chapter covering outside versus inside passers in the endgame plus one dealing with split passed pawnsThe course is rich in annotated games and instructive examples taken from elite-level games.
Sam Shankland is a world-class Grandmaster and a mainstay of the US national team, and he is here to share with you the pawn secrets he's learned over the to get you winning.
Are you ready to start approaching passed pawns with confidence? Get Small Steps 2 Success today.
