The Kings Indian Revolution by GM Arun and GM Magesh
“Every once in a while a man comes to the game and changes the way the world looks at it.” This is a quote from an advertisement portraying Sachin Tendulkar as the “Man” and the game obviously being “Cricket”. If you do not know Sachin (You most likely are not an Indian) we are not going to bother explaining, you can just Google him and you will know he is definitely worth knowing about. Turning our attention back to the theme, in today's world “A good idea is worth Millions.” Obviously there are several things that have to work out to make millions, but our point is that it all starts with an idea. In Chess we have been exposed to several novel ideas. We would like to divide them into two major categories. Some of them are exceedingly good moves that revolutionize a particular branch of an opening, and the others are strong ideas that widen the spectrum for opening as a whole. Today, we will take a look at one particular idea that was developed during the mid twentieth century by strong players like David Bronstein, Yefim Geller and Isaak Boleslavsky in the King's Indian g3 system that really changed the way that opening was played in times to come.
To understand the value of a new idea, one needs to be aware of the difficulties faced with the older ideas. So let us start today by studying the problems for black in the position arising after exd4 in this opening. Our first game today is a solid display of positional understanding from Max Euwe.
This idea is our main focus. Black typically avoided this system due to several reasons,
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White gets a solid center and it is extremely hard for black to get any further break through with d5 or f5
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White's threat to play Nd5 and expand his space further needs to be stopped at some point with c6 which leads to a huge weakness at d6 in the semi open file.
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Since black is not able to break through, it generally leads to very cramped inactive positions for black.
This game is a typical example of how passive play can be punished. Black did not make any real attempts to activate his pieces during the whole game, And this is exactly where David Bronstein will differ and prove that this position was definitely playable for black. Bronstein had tremendous success with his active ideas in this opening; the next two games are excellent demonstrations of active piece play from him. He has introduced this strong idea of giving up the d6 pawn many a time (not that white can capture it on all occasions) and initiating a strong queenside offensive.
Black still faces some difficulties in the system, but nevertheless it is very much playable even today. For example, it takes a lot of creative and active play from black, he cannot afford to play normal moves as we saw in the first game it would lead to too much passivity. On the other hand white can afford to play some simple and natural looking moves. But this is a general downside when one tries to take the initiative by sacrificing material. We hope our readers enjoyed and learned as much from David Bronstein's creative play.
