In Part I, we saw what White has at his disposal on move 1. Here we will take a look at what Black can do when faced with each of White’s main moves (except for 1.e4, which will be dealt with in Part III).
White’s 1.b3 was deemed impractical in our analysis in Part I and rightly so. Black has a wide array of choices here and can pick up any line that is to his liking.
The Grunfeld defense is one of the most popular defenses against 1.d4 nowadays and it has been quite a pain for white since the last decade. Without a real path to an advantage, the legion of 1.d4 players has been constantly switching from one line to another, playing the surprise factor card. Through the history of modern chess, the greatest players have contributed massively to the development of this resourceful variation.
I already touched upon this subject in my previous article How To Train, where I addressed the technical aspects of how to choose an opening, how to study it afterwards, how to use the database and the engine. If you haven’t done so already, I strongly recommend you read it first.
In this article, I will analyse various openings from the aspect of their practicality. By practicality I mean easiness to memorise and play. Does an opening require a lot of preparation before you can play it?
The opening is nowadays probably one of the most studied of the three phases of the game. We have always said that there should be a balance between the time given to each of them in your training schedule and that it’s more important to get a good understanding of the game by studying a lot of classic games, as well as middlegame and endgame concepts and key positions. However, you shouldn’t misunderstand this.
In order to get to show your knowledge, you must first achieve a good position from the opening. What we mean is that, if you are a club player, it probably makes no sense to memorize a large number of complicated variations only to quickly collapse once the theory is over.
The Dutch Defense is a popular choice against 1.d4 among club players, although not that often seen at the top level. Nevertheless, it has been used by many strong players, such as ex-World Champions Alexandr Alekhine and Mikhail Botvinnik, Bent Larsen, Miguel Najdorf, Artur Yussupov, Nigel Short.
It has also been employed from time to time by players like Hikaru Nakamura and Magnus Carlsen. There are many possible set-ups for black, but in this article, we are going to focus on the Stonewall System, a line where black gambles on an attack on the kingside and can be quite annoying for white if he’s not prepared to deal with it.
It is difficult nowadays to get a good game without having a fair amount of theory knowledge. There is no such thing as an easy game anymore, as almost everybody, as amateur as they are, knows openings. It is probably the most studied phase of the game and it’s important that you pass it successfully. In other words, you have to know as much as to get into at least a playable (if not slightly better) middlegame.
From our very first steps into chess studying we are taught about the importance of the initiative in the game – a concept somewhat difficult to understand at first glance and one that demands a certain degree of comprehension of the game. Let us start with the official definition of initiative; what is it exactly?
The initiative in chess belongs to the player who can make threats that cannot be ignored. This way, he puts the opponent to defend against these threats, not being able to make moves that accomplish a certain plan of his own.
What’s most popular than the King’s Indian Defense against 1.d4? Probably nothing. The King’s Indian Defense has a well-deserved reputation of spectacular battles often terminated with a massacre on White’s kingside castle. The philosophy behind this defense has always been the same, black plays a kingside fianchetto regardless of what white plays and then he attacks the center and depending on what kind of pawn structure arises black will attack one flank or the other, but the goal is the same black plays for the mate!
How many times do we lose a game or get a clearly worse position right out of the opening because we don’t know the secrets and hidden traps in it? As a beginner, it happens many times over the board and it seems like this the only way we had to learn them; the hard way, so to speak. Of course, this is always a difficult blow to digest; it’s a very bad feeling when we lose a game in only a few moves due to lack of theoretical knowledge or lack of awareness. Openings were a very tricky thing 20 years ago; now, thanks to the amount of information that is available to anyone, things are different. Not to mention that we now have a much better place to lose than in a tournament game – the online play.
The denominated Slav Defense begins after the moves 1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 and is one of the most popular choices against the Queen’s Gambit. This defense bears its name due to the number of masters from Slavic countries that started developing it and introduced it into tournament practice. Some of them were Alekhine, Bogoljubow, and Vidmar. The Slav began to be taken seriously in the 1920s and to this day it is, without doubt, one of the toughest defenses to crack, if there is such possibility at all. This system is an ambitious one; black defends the center just as he would with 2…e6, but without shutting the diagonal for the c8 bishop.
