The Queen's Indian Defense by GM Arun and GM Magesh
We discussed the “Hypermodern” Nimzo Indian defense a few weeks earlier. When any professional chess player talks about the Nimzo Indian defense, the Queen's Indian defense also comes into their mind automatically as these openings go hand in hand. Players who wish to study one of these openings generally have to study the other one also. Whether it is the compulsion to learn them due to white's move order (Black does have other choices like Bogo Indian defense) or the solidity of this opening combination, these two have been a strong asset for black against 1.d4 for many years now.
This week we will focus on a particular variation in the Queen's Indian Defense that has been very popular among the strong Grand Masters of late. We will study all the possibilities in this variation using some model games as usual.
Our readers probably notice that we are splitting up most of our articles into two parts; this is because we have realized that most openings have concepts and games that require at least so much material to be covered. Therefore we will stick with the same principle again this week.
So this is the pawn sacrifice variation we will be dwelling upon for the next two weeks. Luckily there have been so many novelties and other fresh ideas coming up in this position to keep us up to date. White is just a pawn down here, however he has plenty of compensation for it in terms of space and development. Now let us take a look at some of the main possibilities for both sides,
10.Rd1 (The main move here, seems quite logical, the rook puts tremendous pressure along the 'd' file and creates lots of problems for black, other possibilities like 10.Qe4, 10.Ne5 have also been tried but the text seems to be the best continuation)
10...Qc8 (The main move again) white has tried a few different choices here. We will mainly discuss the continuations following this position.
Now let us switch to the main move 10...Qc8 for the next two games. The Armenian Super Grand Master Gabriel Sargissian has managed to totally outplay his counter part Alexander Grishchuk in an important Olympiad game from 2008.
Our last game today is from none other than the current world champion Viswanathan Anand himself, however he is on the receiving end this time from Veselin Topalov.
