The Power of Pawns

It is important to make clear that this book is not laid out like a text book or a focused instructional manual on pawn play. Rather it is basically an annotated game collection in disguise grouped by themes. The instruction on pawns is implicit and not systematic.

Hickl uses full games where pawn structures are important, but he doesn’t always spell out the key lessons or distill general principles. 

Structure of the book

The book starts with three chapters on the relationship between pawns and pieces, the bishop the knight and the rook, then chapters on hanging pawns, isolated pawns, backward pawns, passed pawns, doubled pawns, weak squares, and one on pawn chains. 

Each chapter can probably be read in any order, though in the chessable course coach Andras Toth recommends doing the first three chapters about pieces first before jumping into whatever you are interested in. Chapters usually begin with a quick page or two about the ideas and plans for white and black where the main feature of the position is the chapter’s eponymous pawn theme. 

Maybe it is unreasonable for me to compare every book’s annotations to Irwin Chernev’s magisterial “Logical chess: move by move,” but where Chernev painstakingly explains the purpose of every move, “The Power of Pawns” blasts through a dozen moves before making a point and it is not always easy to keep up with all of the subtle details of a game by, say,  Karpov.

Take the game between Karpov and Taimanov in the chapter on backward pawns for example – on move 17 the annotation reads “now all that is missing is c3-c4. White could then take the passive Bd2 off the defense of the c pawn and entrust it with other taks” karpov then goes on to sacrifice a pawn in order to blockade the c4 square. It was not at all clear to me that this blockade was worth a pawn or that sacrificing a pawn wouldn’t lead to counterplay or infiltration. 

Then there is some piece shuffling all the way to move 26. Where the author tells us Taimanov thought “I cannot be worse here.” Ok? What were the last nine moves about? What are the future plans for either side? I know black is ganging up against the backward pawn because that is the title of the chapter, but I would like a bit more to go on. Why is Taimanov so optimistic when the backward pawn issue is supposed to be so dire? 

Then we have to wait all the wait til move 34 for another comment on the actual game: here the author tells us that Taimanov was too passive and this was the time for him to get active then shows a couple of variations of how he could’ve done so. 

All the way to move 39 he tells us that Taimanov ran out of time but also “the outcome of the game was not yet decided, white can still put up a defence.” I am not just bothered by the vague and even lazy amount of direct instruction, but even by the choice of game. If the result was still unclear by the end then why not pick a more decisive example? In fact, amateur games might be even more instructive than master games because few mortals can aspire to play like Karpov and Taimanov. 

I chose this game because it is indicative  of the rest of the book: high level games, sparsely annotated, they kind of revolve around the theme of the chapter, but you mostly have to “see” that for yourself because Hickl, I guess, assumes it’s so obvious that he doesn’t need to comment most of the time. 

Conclusion

In my original mini review of this book I wrote that “the things this book doesn’t teach you about pawns could fill a better book.” But maybe I am being overly harsh. It is entirely possible, and I mean this without any sarcasm, that this book is brilliant and simply above my current level. It’s possible that Hickl is just so advanced that he failed to see how a club player might not see what he sees in these games. Coach Andras does a much better job bringing the examples to life in the chessable course, but now you are talking about $150 vs $20 for the book and even coach Andras often blasts through a ton of moves very quickly. 

Maybe this is simply a mismatch in expectations: Hickl never advertised this as a pawn manual. But I feel it was a huge missed opportunity to distill theory and point out common patterns. Other authors extract lessons clearly, again I am thinking of Chernev here but others like Jeremy Silman and Michael Stean too.

This book may be useful at higher levels, but as for me, my search for an intro level book on pawn play continues.

Other Middlegame Books for beginner and intermediate players you might find useful