Author: Steve Worley
Date: 16:01:43 12/25/97
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Don Dailey's endgame book investigation is interesting and verifies a well known fact. In endgames, pushing pawns is not overly common. As he said, a pawn push is often preceded by 20 moves of jockeying of the other pieces. However, this does NOT mean that passed pawn push extentions are not important. The purpose of extensions is not as a prediction of whether a move is good or not; it is an attempt to identify moves that are "critical" and make sure that if the move causes problems the side to move can deal with them or not. In the case of passed pawn pushing, I suspect that the extensions are important because they help with the non-pawn jockeying which is so common. The purpose of this jockeying is to get into a situation where you are finally able to push the pawn. By using pushed-pawn extensions, you identify those situations where it's finally safe to push. Thus, the benefit of pushed pawn extensions is not that it allows you to push faster, it's actually enhancing your "jockeying" to make sure you're setting up (or defending against) that eventual pawn push later. Think of check extensions. You don't do them because checks are always great moves, you do them to make sure that when a check occurs, the side in check is able to deal with it effectively. -Steve
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