As a general rule, doubled pawns are considered a weakness due to their inability to defend each other, and it is usually a good strategy to exchange at least one of them to strengthen the position. On the other hand, if the opponent is unable to effectively attack the doubled pawns, their inherent weakness may be of little or no consequence.
Opening Theory
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Play like Fischer and beat the King’s Gambit
Robert James Fischer, the eleventh World Chess Champion (1972-1975), once said that the rejection of any gambit begins with accepting it. After losing a game to Boris Spassky in 1960 (Fischer, as black, chose the Kieseritzky gambit), he decided to refute the king’s gambit once and for all.
Variants
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Three Checks, Knight Relay, Fischer Random … 25 variants in one YouTube playlist
There are literally thousands of chess variants to choose from, and many sites to try them online. And if you are not certain about specific rules or just want to observe some variants before playing them, I created a playlist on one of my YouTube channels to publish videos of 25 selected types of chess games.
Full Game Analysis
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Danish Gambit Accepted, Classical Defense
The material is almost even, but the white queen will turn out to be more mobile than the black rook/knight combo. I could have resigned at this very position. However, you know, I wanted to find out if my queen-side pawns were or weren’t capable of threatening White in any way. So, let’s make a few more moves.
Opening Theory
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Learn to play Danish Gambit
A key to mastering a chess opening is to understand its fundamental idea. Without knowing the objective of the opening moves, we aren’t ready for any unusual response that could come from the opponent, which usually leads to losing any previously gained advantage.
Curiosities
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Trade restrictions – a very long game with no captures in 93 moves
The game was played at the World Junior Chess Championship in Stockholm (August 1969, Anatoly Karpov dominated the finals). If you click through the moves, you can observe that the first capture really happened at the move 94. Until then, white kept a positional advantage, but for reasons unknown didn’t manage to open any attack.
Tools
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RPB Chessboard
RPB Chessboard is a plugin for WordPress, the popular blog CMS. It allows typesetting and displaying chess games and diagrams in posts and pages of WordPress blogs, using the standard FEN and PGN notations.
Full Game Analysis
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Introduction, and a deep game analysis – King’s Gambit Declined, Keene Defense
The defense already appeared in a textbook from the 19th century. The author was Paul Rudolf von Bilguer, a German master and theoretician, a member of the “Berlin Pleiades” group. Raymond Keene was credited with exploring it and finding a better game for black.