By Efstratios Grivas

Published by GAMBIT

 Grandmaster Efstratios Grivas lives in Athens, and is also an International Chess Arbiter and Organizer. He has represented his country on a great many occasions, winning an individual gold medal at the 1989 European Team Championship and an individual silver medal at the 1998 Olympiad. He is a FIDE Senior Trainer, a Greek federal trainer and an experienced writer.

Chess College is an exciting new series of books that will take intermediate players to new levels of chess understanding. Efstratios Grivas, a grandmaster and highly experienced chess trainer, provides a wealth of instruction on many important aspects of the middlegame. The emphasis is on practical understanding: whenever he introduces a new idea, Grivas immediately illustrates it with a number of entertaining and instructive examples, many of which are drawn from his own practice.

Volume 2: Pawn Play focuses on pawns and investigates many important aspects of their role in chess, their strengths and weaknesses, and their impact on the battle as a whole. 

The chapters are as follow…

• Introduction

• Passed pawn
• Isolated pawn
• Doubled pawns
• Backward pawn
• Hanging pawns
• Pawn-majority
• Pawn-minority
• Central strike

The chapter's names pretty much explain the content of the book. The first main chapter talks about the "passed pawn", a pawn which can advance to promotion without encountering any opposing pawns in its path. Possession of a passed pawn and the ability to exploit its potential is a strategic element that can often determine the result of the game. The second chapter is on the "isolated pawn", pawns which have no pawns of the same color on the neighboring files. Thus, it has been detached from the rest of its camp's pawn structure and can be only protected by pieces. This kind of pawn can be both weak, or can also be a deadly weapon. The following chapter is on "doubled pawns", pawns of the same color that lie on the same file. These pawns, also, have both the possibility of being strong. After that he shows the "backward pawn", a pawn that lies on a semi-open file and constitutes the last part in a pawn chain or group, and thus can not be protected by another pawn. In several cases an isolated pawn can also be a backward pawn, when it is located deep within its own camp. Next chapter is on "hanging pawns", a pair of pawns on neighboring files cut off from the rest of that side's pawn-structure. They are usually on the 4th rank (5th for black) and are situated on semi-open (for the opponent) files, thus receiving the enemy fire without the possibility of being protected by fellow pawns. Thus, they constitute a kind of static weakness. After that he goes over "pawn-majority", numerical superiority in pawns on one of the three sectors of the board (queenside, center, kingside) and "pawn-minorities" being the same but with a numerical inferiority. Grivas finishes up this book with a chapter on "central strike", the unexpected advance of a central pawn or pawns, temporarily disturbing the flow of the position. Its aim is destruction or domination of the opponent's center or generally a pawn-chain.

As the case with volume 1 of this series (also a bit in vol.3), most of the games included are Grivas's. Like I said before, this does have both positives and negatives and I will leave this up to the reader to decide. But overall, this is a great book, and will surely improve your handling of pawn play in chess!

NSG rating = 9.7 of 10