Game Spotlight: The Minority Attack

A significant part of opening a game deals with the pawns.  Where the pawns end up determines what strategies are possible.  So let’s look at a common strategy that can show up in the Queen’s Gambit Declined, for example:

This also shows up from the black side in the Sicilian Defence:

Notice the two pawns sitting alone on the queenside.  When you have that, a strategy to consider is the “minority attack”.  The idea is that you’d like to put a Rook on the c-file and target the opposing pawn there, but that’s easy to defend with another pawn.  So instead, you use the queenside pawns you have.  Send them at your opponent, trade them off, and then there’s nothing of your opponent’s to support the c-pawn.  Let’s look at the first time anyone tried this:

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