Chessable – Shankland Small Steps 2 Success 540p

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