Minority attack
Advancing your fewer pawns on a wing against the opponent's majority to create a weakness.
It sounds backwards — attacking with fewer pawns — but the point is not to win a pawn, it is to force a trade that leaves the opponent with a lasting weakness, typically a backward pawn on a half-open file.
The classic setting is the Queen's Gambit Exchange structure, where White pushes b4–b5 against Black's c- and d-pawns to saddle Black with a weak c6-pawn.
It is a model plan: a way to play for a long-term structural edge rather than an immediate tactic, and understanding it teaches you to create targets instead of hunting for them.
Rushing the pawn break before your rooks are on the file that the resulting weakness will sit on.
Related terms
See Minority attack in your own games
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