From the Opening to the Middlegame - Positions with Doubled Pawns 

From the Opening to the Middlegame: Positions with Doubled Pawns

Doubled pawns appear in countless openings, yet most players never develop a consistent way to handle them. Most handle them by feel rather than by principle, which rarely holds up under pressure.

GM Ioannis Papaioannou built his latest course around exactly this problem. From the Opening to the Middlegame: Positions with Doubled Pawns is not a theoretical overview of doubled-pawn structures. It is a training system for developing structural judgment — the kind of understanding that replaces rules of thumb with genuine positional reasoning.

The prevailing instinct is to label doubled pawns as a weakness and move on. Papaioannou's approach is more demanding: he shows when they are a liability, when they are a strength, and how to build coherent plans around them in either case. A guiding principle runs through all four lessons — don't accept doubled pawns in the opening unless it is theoretical — and understanding why that rule exists, and what to do when you break it, is central to the course.

The material covers how these structures arise from specific opening choices, with concrete examples from the Caro-Kann, the London, the Catalan, and others. From there, the focus shifts to how doubled pawns influence piece activity, pawn breaks, king safety, and long-term transitions into the endgame.

After his recent course Transition from the Opening to the Endgame, Papaioannou now turns his attention to the middlegame phase — where doubled pawns immediately define the strategic character of a position. The two courses are independent, but each addresses a different stage where structural understanding is important.

Course details:

• 6 hours of video instruction across 4 lessons (approx. 1.5 hours each)
• 85 Practical examples in a PGN format
• 40 test positions with solutions
• Multilingual PGN files (English, German, French, Spanish)

If your structural understanding has ever left you without a plan in these positions, this course gives you the framework to change that. Add From the Opening to the Middlegame: Positions with Doubled Pawns to your training today.

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