Learning Some Chess

Okay, here we are! The week is through, I've been studying the Isolated Queen's Pawn chapter in "Chess Structures", and it's time for some writing. A few things to mention up front: I'm writing this primarily in the hope that the act of writing will make me understand it better. I'm sharing it on the off-chance it helps somebody else understand it better. It's obviously not a definitive or deep guide to anything. This is mostly a synthesis of Mauricio Flores Rios, but there's some original stuff too. The latter probably isn't very reliable. tl;dr Alternative title for this section: Some Generalizations That Are So Broad As To Be Useless Isolated Queen's Pawn aka IQP aka Isolani is a common pawn structure. Don't be afraid of the IQP! It brings open lines and central space, and you'll often get good attacking chances. On the flip side, if you don't have that activity, you may indeed be doomed to defending a sad position. Making th...

 What is this? This is me writing about chess. Specifically: My learning process. Some hopefully-useful articles on concepts I'm learning; explaining something is a good way to learn! Maybe some game analysis. Whatever else I feel like writing. Why is this? I feel like writing. Putting my thoughts down helps crystallize them. If somebody else finds it interesting or at least tolerable, great! Particularly, the inspiration is my attempt to work through "Chess Structures" by Mauricio Flores Ríos. I realized that I'd study half a dozen games with an isolated Queen's Pawn, but I never took a step back and tried to tie them all together, and so missed some depth of understanding. I'm hoping to cover a chapter each week, and then do a write-up on the structure, plus some examples from outside the book. We'll see how it goes. In the meantime... Who is this? I'm a so-called "adult chess learner". I knew the rules as a kid, never got too involved, the...