Clutch pawns in atomic960

Can a single pawn win a game? Yes if other pieces cooperate. Except when actually one pawn does all the work. All examples in this blog come from games played on https://www.pychess.org mostly from Atomic960 Shield Arenas. If you wanna try it out we have a big tournament every 3rd Sunday of the month 12:00 UTC, the next one is on the 18th of September. Without further ado let's jump into the action

Game 1

That was quick, but that's what happens all the time in atomic960. Just like in regular atomic if someone doesn't know the theory they may lose very quickly, except here no-one knows any theory

Game 2

Another very quick example, now let's have a look at something a bit longer

Game 3

15 moves rather than 6 or 7, but still the game was decided very early on. Time has come for some endgame examples, of course a pawn can win the endgame if it promotes, but that's boring, let's see something different

Game 4

What a painful loss that could have been, right? But how many losses like this do you expect to experience if you're not careful/how many swindles to pull off if you are? Not that many. I scanned over 2000 atomic960 games from pychess with a puzzle generating script (yes we do have puzzles coming in somewhat near future) and I found only 2 more examples of similar mate in 2 with a single pawn, which is what to be expected given for this to work we needed a pawn on e4, the king on e6, a pawn on f6 which was about to be attacked, something to prevent f5 from working, namely the g4 pawn, some piece controlling d5 and some piece blocking d7 for a total of 6 pieces placed in just the right positions. Also this means this still wasn't an example of a pawn doing all of the work on its own. So is it even possible? Let's have a look at another example:

Game 5

Finally here only one pawn was needed to mate, again it was missed, but did it matter? Not at all. But let's have a look at the saddest example ever

Game 6

Once in a lifetime chance blown, but this time white didn't even play a move. No white didn't resign here, what happened is even sadder. They had about 30s on their clock and just ran out of time probably due to disconnection. https://lichess.org/@/DEIFI, if you happened to read it and remember what happened feel free to share it in the comments

Outro

That's all I have for you today, I hope you enjoyed those games and if you wanna try it yourself, check out this tournament.