The Queen´s Indian Defense Part 2 by GM Arun and GM Magesh

Welcome back to the continuation of our study of the latest developments in the Queen's Indian defense pawn sacrifice variation. Last week we saw white bulldozing his way through black's defenses with this newly found pawn sacrifice idea. Now it is time for us to listen to the other side of the story, When a fresh idea is revealed to the top players, it gets latched on to their analysis engines (by which we mean their minds too :P )  and we start seeing that particular opening in increasing frequency with more and more interesting novelties surfacing at the top level tournaments. As a group of players are trying to improve on the new idea, naturally there is also another set of players trying to refute this new idea. An opening variation fades out of existence when a particular group here runs out of ideas, but it can always be brought back to life with a fresh idea and there goes the cycle again....

This week we will start out by taking a look at a game from the prodigious Philippine Grand Master So Wesley at work. He comes with an improvement over the Topolov-Anand Game that we saw last week.

The variation with 10.Qe4 was tried extensively in the early phase of this opening experiment. Our next game is a fantastic display of defensive skills from the young Sergey Kariakin against Peter Svidler, and this game has been one of the reasons on why this particular move from white is not popular anymore.