Drazen Marovic’s manual on pawn play offers a great deal of practical knowledge to the tournament player. The format of the book is a game collection, with chapters organized around common pawn structures. The chapters are (1) Isolated Queen’s Pawns (2) Isolated Pawn Couples and Hanging pawns (3) Passed Pawns (4) Doubled Pawns (5) Backward Pawns (6) Pawn Chains (7) Pawn Islands. While the book has been criticized as merely restating common knowledge and theory about such positions, I don’t think a book should be held to such a high standard of being theoretically novel. In fact, a succinct restatement in one text of what is already known is often more instructional than an original theoretical work where, as here, the passage of time has stripped away the flowery language and unnecessary polemics (think my system), leaving the fast and hard rules in their brute simplicity.
