Converting Hans Kmoch’s Pawn Power in Chess from old descriptive notation to Algebraic!
I recently had the opportunity to convert Hans Kmoch’s classic book Pawn Power in Chess to algebraic notation. What a fascinating book this is!
Hans was quite a strong chess player. I learned from Wikipedia that he was an International Master and had represented Austria three times in chess Olympiads. He had even been a second for Alexander Alekhine to help him prepare for his matches with Efim Bogoljubow.
I noticed that throughout the book, Hans constantly shared Alekhine’s thoughts about positions with comments like: “…would most likely also lead to a draw, according to Alekhine”, or, “This move has Alekhine’s full approval”. It seems obvious that he had analyzed with him a lot and had learned many things about chess through their work together.
The original text was published in 1959, so there will undoubtedly be some analysis flaws, but that doesn’t bother me. It’s to be expected from pre-computer era books. I remember listening to GM Jesse Krai talking about how he loves these old chess books, saying that while reading them you can have an internal debate with the author about the variations. Also, it’s nice to know that Hans put his own thought into the lines, and they weren’t just churned out by an engine.
At first, I’ll admit that the book appeared rather daunting. Not only was it published in the old descriptive notation (1. P–K4 P–QB4 instead of 1.e4 c5), but I would frequently come across written descriptions of pawn formations that really should have been turned into diagrams. Here’s one example of numerous such instances:
In an ideal world, the sentence: “For instance PQB4, PQ4 vs PQB3, PQ4; or PQB4, PQ4 vs PQ4, PK3; or PQB4, PQ4 vs PQ4” would become three separate diagrams.
This book was filled with such descriptions of pawn formations! My guess is that the publisher had a limited number of diagrams they could include in the original book, so to save space, Hans needed to describe pawn formations this way. It makes sense from a cost-of-printing perspective, but from a readability perspective, it’s far from ideal.
Forward Chess is a digital book publisher, so space for diagrams isn’t an issue. With that in mind, I created diagrams for all such instances. Here is what that same passage will look like on our app:
Much easier to follow, eh?
I think that the copious new diagrams (118 in total) significantly improve the book’s readability. I can only imagine the amount of work it took to make it through the original text. You’d need to have your chess board out, trying to decipher the descriptive notation while setting up positions all the time to understand what he was talking about. Thankfully, with the Forward Chess version, all of this will be unnecessary.
I was fascinated by this book because Hans Kmoch was so passionate about understanding the laws and principles of pawn play. He even created his own new vocabulary because the framework that would allow him to systemize these structures simply hadn’t been invented yet. Who makes up their own terminology to write about a topic because no adequate vocabulary for what you want to discuss exists? Someone like Hans.
He reminded me of a chess scientist. The reader can sense that he worked tirelessly to classify these pawn structures. His goal was to convey this to the reader so that these structures could be easier for readers to grasp and evaluate.
Once I started making diagrams for all those instances where he describes pawn formations in descriptive notation, it changed the way I perceived the book as I was working on it. I went from sighing in frustration to becoming genuinely curious about what he had to say about these formations.
Another thing I liked about this book was the feeling of going back in time to a bygone chess era. You’ll see annotated games by players from that time such as Samuel Reshevsky, Arthur Bisguier, Robert Byrne, and others. There’s even a game where the author plays against Alekhine himself.
When the book was first published, the Benoni was all the rage. For this reason, he devotes an entire chapter to the different structures that may arise from it. I thought it was interesting how the Benko (Volga) gambit was called the Benoni Gambit back then. This book was published before Pal Benko had made so many contributions to this opening.
Also, there were some names of attacking schemes that I had never heard of which Hans uses throughout the book, such as the “St. George attack” and “Night attack”.
With the St. Geroge attack, he’s not referring to the St. George opening. This book was written before that had come about. Instead, he’s referring to the typical situation where an h-pawn is used to attack a fianchettoed Kingside, such as in a Sicilian Dragon, but not limited to that opening.
It got me thinking, “Who was St. George, and why was this attack named after him?” I found the idea of a saint playing chess a little hard to imagine. Was St. George the name of a place where a famous game featuring this attack took place? I became very curious to know the origin of this name for the h-pawn attack, wondering if it was a commonly used expression, or just something a small group of chess players used to say. Unfortunately, I was unable to uncover anything about this from my Google searches. Edward Winter, please help me out here!
What he calls the “Night attack” is a situation where you sacrifice an e-pawn to damage your opponent’s pawn structure. Here’s what Hans writes about this idea: “Since the whole action is designed to catch the defender’s forces, so to say, in their sleep, we call it the Night attack.” Something about naming this concept the “Night attack” tickles my funny bone, and I’m not sure why. By the way, every time he says “we” in the book, I imagine him an Alekhine nodding in agreement.
I believe that Forward Chess has made this classic book much easier for readers to understand and follow. I think that this book is quite interesting and can highly recommend our version of it to readers. You know a book makes an impact on you when you start using terminology from the book in your thought process while playing a game.
Last night I played a rapid game, and while calculating, I remember thinking: “If I sacrifice the exchange, I’ll get these powerful passed duos on the kingside!” With that in mind, and somehow remembering that Hans considered them “tremendous”, I went for it, reaching this position:
While it’s true that I’m not winning here, it’s also true that I have compensation for sacrificing the exchange. I think that on a practical level, it was a good decision, especially for a rapid game.
My opponent immediately went wrong with 28…Rf8?, which gave me a decisive advantage after 29.Bf4, though the position is super complicated. Later, I botched my advantage by playing h6? rather than the winning g6! Still, I found the imbalances of the position fascinating, and I don’t know that I would have even considered this particular exchange sacrifice had I not read this book.
I really enjoyed this one, and I hope you will too!
Explore other Dover Publications Classics here >>
- Reviving Hans Kmoch’s Pawn Power in Chess for modern readers! - July 31, 2025
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