Hello,

i need an advise... in my chess study, i am now in the stage of building my opening repertoire and i arrived to a cross-road - (as white) avoid the marshall (a4 and more) or going into it without fear (c3) ???

what should i do? i will be happy to hear your thoughts...

good day!

Avoid it. Black will almost certainly know it better than you, and even if you both manage to get real booked up, it is still hard for white to win in the resulting endgames. I like to play 8.h3 so that if they play 8...d6 I can transpose back to the closed lines with 9.c3.

thank u BigTy, i thought actually ill got answers like - "go to the battle without fear man!!!" but i assume that in this case its better not to get into risk...

i actually dont understand why 8.a4/h3/d4 are the anti-marshall moves... where can i find an explain for that?

thank u

Well, compare the position after 8.c3 d5 9.exd5 Nxd5 10.Nxe5 Nxe5 11.Rxe5 c6 12.d4 Bd6 13.Re1 Qh4 with the position that arises after 8.h3 d5 9.exd5 Nxd5 10.Nxe5 Nxe5 11.Rxe5 c6 12.d4 Bd6 13.Re1 Qh4. Here you can see that 8.h3 was clearly more useful for white than 8.c3 was in this resulting position as he can now follow up with 14.Qd3 instead of the weakening 14.g3, and the c3 square is available for his knight which can help him develop faster in some lines. Black players usually avoid this with 8...Bb7 which leads to a very different game. I don't really know much about the other lines, but I would expect the ideas to be similar. 8.a4 is probably more usefull than 8.c3 in a Marshall attack position.

h3 stops the Marshall because the Marshall is predicated upon gambiting a pawn to work up an attack with the black queen at h4, then later at h3...and the black bishop at g4.  A white pawn at h3 stops those ideas cold.  Meaning that the gambited pawn offers no compensation if black chooses to go through with it.

a4 stops the Marshall because if black goes through with the d5 push, white can simply take on b5, attacking the black knight at c6.  Black can of course capture on e4, and counter attack white's knight on f3, but by the time all that's done, the structure of the game has been altered significantly from the proposed Marshall lines.  You've had an exchange of pawns (and maybe pieces), rather than a gambit followed by an attack.

Here's what I play:

This line is much less common, and it will put Marshall players out in the woods.