6.Weak Pawns

Quite often when we play, we should keep an eye on the opponent's pawn structure, namely, if there are any weak pawns, most often the plan would be to put pressure on them. This would lead to the balance of activity of the pieces to switch in our favor since our pieces will attack, and the opponent's pieces will need to defend the weak pawn. In general, most often, weak pawns are the ones that can't be protected by pawns on the neighbouring files and they are attacked by the opponent's pieces. In the following examples we can see how this works in practice.