King's Indian Defense Repertoire 1 : Classical variation

King's Indian defense is a versatile weapon in the hands of a skilled player playing against white.

The game is full of dynamic power play of strategies, themes and tactics on both sides. It is very popular at grand master levels and many world champions have tried it.

The vast scope of this opening has resulted in many memorable games in the history.

A beautiful game in king's indian defense can be descried  as a swashbuckling of ideas and positional tactics.

It does not matter whether white wins or black wins, when a good KID game ends, both the players are happy along with the spectators for witnessing a beautiful dance of positional play.

The black creates the fortress for  his castled king with his DSB fianchittoed.  In doing so black gives his claim on the center and on queenside. White on the other hand claims a massive center and space on queenside. 

The white attacks the queen side and black attacks the king side.

Whoever gets there first will win the game.

Naturally this game is full of attacks from both sides, defenses, sacrifices and surprises.

There are many variations in this opening but we will start with the classical variation first.

                    King's Indian Defense Classical Variation:

Now we have a very interesting position here. 

White has a lot of space on the queen side and black has mejority of his pieces aligning themselves on the king side. White will expand on queen side hoping to break through the c file and infiltrating 6th or 7th rank or queening the pawn on queen side.

Black on the other side is playing on king side and attacking the white king trying to check mate the white king.

We stop here for the discussion and feed backs. What are the various strategies of black and white. Are there any opening traps. Are there any punishments if the move order is changed by black or white. and so on.

Now let us move forward for few moves. we have come up to first 8 moves of the opening.

Here there are two lines where white either plays Nd3 to prevent Nd7 going to e5 or plays f3 so that it's dark square bishop can come to e3 and then f2 to counter black's attack.  White will try as many pieces as possible to gather around the king for an effective defense. Another theme to get Be3 is to play Qd2 and then Bh6 and exchange the black's fianchittoed bishop.

Simultaneously will try to attack on queen side when opportunity arises.

This is good enough time for us to study some hallmark games in this variation. In the next blog post we will discuss one of such games.

Regards.

Dr. Sanjay