When just learning how to play chess, it is important to begin to understand how to use multiple chess pieces together in combination. This doesn’t always mean different types of pieces and even with just pawns on the board a chess player can often calculate to find the best one. This is one of my favorite examples because it is simple enough that someone who just knows how to move pawns can solve it, but its complicated enough to show a beginners the beauty of using pieces together in combination.

Here we go: Imagine you have this position set up:

As you can see, both teams have only three pawns. and in this puzzle it is whites goal is to get to the other side with one pawn. How do you do this?

Give it a try first, the answer is below.

So how do we solve this problem? One important aspect is to look ahead into all the option, now just the obvious.

Lets start with the f5 pawn. If you move this pawn forward, how can black block white’s advance?

Black can just move his pawn to g6 from g7 and white cant do anything. So this doesn’t work. Lets move on.

If we move the g5 pawn to g6, is there any way to win?

The first thing to notice is that black must capture the pawn, or the pawn will capture on either h7 or f7. After black moves his h7 pawn to capture g6, can you find what white should do?

If white captures back, nothing good comes from it. Both pawns end up stuck. Look below:

So what does white do? Well, are you ready? Try it yourself first?

White should move his f5 pawn to f6. Check out the chess position below.

If black captures the pawn on f6, whites pawn on h5 has a clean file that it can get to the other side without problem. If black captures the pawn on h5, the white pawn on f6 will capture on g7 and get to the other side to win.

Hope you enjoy Dr. Connolly!