Converting an Extra Pawn in Chess by GM Sam Shankland + PGN Aug 04, 2025

From Winning Pawns to Winning Games:
How to Turn Your Extra Pawns into Victories

We’ve all been there: you win a pawn at some point in the game, get your hopes up, try your best to play correctly to convert it into a win — yet somehow, things don’t go as planned. It happens to the best, even to 2700+ grandmasters!

An extra pawn is one of the most common advantages in chess — and often all you need to win the game — but converting it successfully is usually anything but simple:

Even with two extra pawns, the win is not guaranteed −
if you took the rook here in the end instead of
playing f1=Q, you would draw!

If you know how to handle these situations, your extra pawn can become a game-winner instead of a missed opportunity. And GM Sam Shankland is here to help you make that happen.

The Three Elements of Success

There are three key elements for a successful conversion, each explored in its own dedicated chapter:

🔒 Stabilize: Once you’ve managed to win a pawn, you should consolidate your position and prevent counterplay before thinking about conversion.

🔄 Make the Right Changes: Understand which trades and structural changes improve your winning chances and which ones help your opponent.

🎯 Find a Plan for the Pawn: Develop a clear understanding of what your extra pawn is achieving and a reliable plan for how to make use of it.

In this course, you will learn how to correctly assess which element you need to apply to the position in front of you. In most situations, all three elements will be needed consecutively to drive the point home.

You’ll work through carefully selected examples where you can practice this:

White has won a pawn, but Black is ahead in
development and the knight on c5 is a problem.
How can you consolidate the position
and avoid counterplay?

It’s also crucial to understand which exchanges work in your favor and which don’t. Here you will go far beyond the primitive principle of ‘just trade everything when you’re a pawn up.’

Consider the following position: Should White exchange queens here, or keep them on the board by retreating the knight to c3?

In cases like these, you need to consider how to stabilize the position,
avoid counterplay, and determine which trades and
pawn structure changes work in your favor.

As you get closer to the endgame, you need to recognize moments where the extra pawn is worth more than a piece and has the potential to win the game:

In order to get your kingside pawns through,
you first need to eliminate Black’s g-pawn.
If you were thinking about giving your rook
for the bishop, you had the right idea!

Learn from the Best

All the examples in the course stem from top grandmasters like Carlsen, Giri, Anand and also Shankland himself.

Not only does some of the material come from Shankland’s own games, all of it is material he’s pored over first with students in training sessions and then double-checked with engines. Giving us the best of both: practical insights and analytical rigor.

A former U.S. Champion and Olympiad gold medalist with a peak rating of 2731, Shankland has studied pawn conversion in depth. He even wrote a full book on the topic. A book that is now at your fingertips in the form of this Chessable course.

In summary, you will get structured training in the three phases of pawn conversion as you:

✅Study 156 trainable lines
✅Learn from GMs’ mistakes
✅Get the full picture with detailed analyses of 29 top-level games
✅Watch >11 hours of video instruction by the author