Lilit Mkrtchian's Best Games of 2025 - Understanding pawn structures

by Arne Kaehler
1/6/2026 – Lilit Mkrtchian analyzes a complex and instructive game she played against 17-year-old Georgian rising star Anastasia Gad at the European Women’s Championship, showing how deep opening preparation and understanding of pawn structures gave her an early, lasting advantage. She explains her use of ChessBase to study her opponent’s tendencies, deliberately steering the game into a Slav-type structure with colours reversed, where her opponent made subtle inaccuracies that allowed Lilit to build pressure and play comfortably. Despite time trouble and a tense middlegame with aggressive counterplay, Lilit kept control, found precise tactical solutions, and ultimately converted her advantage, highlighting how opening knowledge, planning, and calm decision-making decide high-level games.
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Lilit Mkrtchian's Best Games of 2025 - Understanding pawn structures

Arne reunites with WIM Lilit Mkrtchian after almost three years to revive their popular training format - this time using ChessBase 26 - and asks her to show three of her favourite games of 2025 while explaining her full preparation process.

The key lesson of the video is how decisive opening preparation and structural understanding can be, even against a young and highly dynamic opponent.

Lilit demonstrates a professional preparation process in ChessBase: filtering games by colour and time control, identifying repertoire trends, and preparing for all likely first moves rather than just the main one. A major takeaway is that you don’t need to play an opening regularly to profit from its ideas. Lilit applies Slav Defense concepts with colours reversed, gaining a clear plan in an unfamiliar-looking position.

The game also shows how small early inaccuracies, such as an imprecise developing move, can create long-term positional problems that persist into the middlegame.

Another important lesson is planning after development: once pieces are developed, Lilit focuses on pawn breaks, piece coordination, and improving the worst-placed piece instead of forcing tactics.

The video highlights how to stay calm when the position becomes messy, especially under time pressure and against aggressive play, by focusing on concrete threats rather than psychological noise.

Lilit openly shows that even top players miss defensive resources, but what matters is recovering quickly and choosing stabilizing moves instead of panicking. Finally, the game underlines that positional advantages often make tactical solutions possible later, even if the path to conversion is complex.

  • 0:24 Psychological resilience and context matter. Lilit explains the incredible tournament story of her opponent, showing why understanding an opponent’s mindset, form, and recent results is part of serious preparation.
  • 4:07 Structured opening preparation with ChessBase.
  • 9:44 Using unfamiliar structures intelligently.
  • 15:33 Planning after development.
  • 25:06 Staying calm under time pressure and converting advantages.

EXPAND YOUR CHESS HORIZONS
Data, plans, practice – the new Opening Report In ChessBase there are always attempts to show the typical plans of an opening variation. In the age of engines, chess is much more concrete than previously thought. But amateurs in particular love openings with clear plans, see the London System. In ChessBase ’26, three functions deal with the display of plans. The new opening report examines which piece moves or pawn advances are significant for each important variation. In the reference search you can now see on the board where the pieces usually go. If you start the new Monte Carlo analysis, the board also shows the most common figure paths.

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Topics: ChessBase 26, How to prepare, Lilit Mkrtchian
Arne Kaehler, a creative mind who is passionate about board games in general, was born in Hamburg and learned to play chess at a young age. By teaching chess to youth teams and creating chess-related videos on YouTube, Arne was able to expand this passion and has even created an online course for anyone who wants to learn how to play chess. Arne writes for the English and German news sites, but focuses mainly on content for the ChessBase media channels.