The Chebanenko Slav Part 2 by GM Arun and GM Magesh

Last week we saw Black's perspective of the Chebanenko Slav and this week we will continue studying this system, but from White's perspective. As we have given the main introduction about the style of this opening in the previous article, we shall continue to take a look at the games, rather than start from the beginning. We will take a look at games from three world class players: the current World Champion, Anand; the current World number one, Carlsen; and the current World Cup Champion, Gelfand. We are sure that studying these elite players should give one a good idea about this opening and its strategies.

We studied the 5.e3 option in our previous articles and this week we shall take a look at the 5.c5 continuation. In our first game, the current world champ Anand takes care of business against the Chinese Super Grandmaster Wang Yue.

This game is a good example of what pressure can do. White kept nagging Black with constant pressure. You can see that, until the endgame, White just kept maintaining his advantage.  Black was never able to equalize and this eventually led to Black's downfall. As we had mentioned in the previous article, this opening does require a lot of defense from Black side and one should be prepared to do that well. Our next game is from the chess world's current heartthrob, Magnus Carlsen and unfortunately for Wang Yue, the Chinese Grandmaster is once again in the receiving end.

Carlsen's games are very subtle, and sometimes his opponents may never realize what really hit them. Our final game today is from the World Cup champion Boris Gelfand.

Gelfand literally tore open his opponents position with his neat piece sacrifice. Hopefully with the games from last week and this week our readers should have gained a good idea about the Chebanenko Slav.