Sacrificing material for time or piece quality is a key middlegame concept to master. Pawn sacrifices are the hardest of all to learn, but they are also most common and most significant!
Garry Kasparov introduced the concept of material vs quality vs time, and with it he highlighted the importance of dynamic play and different kinds of advantages one could obtain during a chess game. Pure material value is just as important as tempi or the quality of the pieces in certain positions, often far less!
Pawn sacrifices are common in all three stages of a game. During the opening, they mostly serve to gain time. With them you obtain a lead in development and gain the initiative. In an endgame, pawn sacrifices serve as distractions, a mean to an easier promotion. Pawns are often used as bait.
In the middlegame, though, things are a lot more complicated. You don’t get to develop a piece or queen a pawn, there is no immediate win either. Pawn sacrifices in the middlegame serve as long term trade offs of advantages.
Two most common goals behind a pawn sacrifice in the middlegame are creating an attack or improving a piece. If you can make your opponent spend time capturing pawns while you bring more attackers into the game and next to his king, then the sacrifice is justified, and, as the examples by Tal show in the video, the lost pawn will most often be completely irrelevant.
The thing to be aware of is that should your attack fail, you will probably have a lost endgame!
Liberating or improving pieces is the second most common reason why people give up pawns. Those are called positional pawn sacrifices and they serve to improve a piece which is inactive or blocked in its own pawn chain.
Don’t be afraid to give up a point of material if you can get something more valuable in exchange. If you checkmate, you win regardless of how many pieces you have left on the board!
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