The Value of Pawns: Evaluating Material, Quality, and Time - CM C...

Strategy course by CM Can Kabadayi
Includes video and PGN

Language: English
Lectures: 7
Total Running Time: 11 hours 25 minutes

From the course:

Stop Grabbing Pawns and Start Grabbing Points

"How many times have you struggled with the age-old question - do I grab the pawn, or do I let it go?"

Time, quality and material all play a factor when evaluating a position, and evaluating these imbalances correctly can be the difference between winning and losing.

CM Kabadayi recognized the problem here - it’s incredibly hard for club players to evaluate the true value of a pawn when compared to other advantages.

So should you grab the pawn or ignore it? That’s one of the questions Can aims to answer in this course. The course is packed with exercises that’ll force you to calculate accurately and then evaluate the consequences of pawn grabbing. Your ability to intuitively understand the right approach will certainly improve.

In practice, you’ll often find yourself on the other side of the same problem. Should you defend a pawn or simply sacrifice it for an initiative? CM Kabadayi noticed that club players often have a tendency to passively defend material when the best option is to press forward.

After studying the explanatory chapters, you’ll be ready to move onto the 88 instructive puzzles that CM Kabadayi has carefully chosen. You’ll soon be a master of evaluating the cost of a pawn, which is a hugely important part of chess analysis.

So what exactly will you learn in this course?

♟️When you can safely grab a pawn to your advantage
♟️Why you should sometimes ignore a “free” pawn because your opponent will get dangerous compensation
♟️When to spend your time on defending material
♟️The advantage of not passively defending when you can sacrifice material for an initiative
♟️Most importantly - how to evaluate these positions from a distance