Hyper Accelerated Dragon Against Early 4.Qxd4

Greetings chess friends!

Like I said in my previous blog post, there are pros and cons with adopting the Hyper Accelerated Dragon move order. I have mentioned that the move order allows white to steer the position into a Maroczy Bind but these days Black is not afraid to face it. In this blog post let us look at another early deviation by white with an early 4.Qxd4 and find out if black will still have a playable game.

The opening move order in discussion is 1.e4 c5  2.Nf3 g6  3.d4 cxd4  4.Qxd4

With 4.Qxd4 black is really forced to play 4...Nf6 to address the threat on the h8 rook.

After 4...Nf6 white needs to decide wether to play e5 now or later because of black's obvious next move ...Nc6 chasing the white queen away from the a1-h8 diagonal.

Lets see a game I had recently here in chess.com against a 2000+ player and put attention on how black can neutralize white's pressure on the a1-h8 diagonal.

Please take note of the movelist pane on the right for other variation analysis.

So we saw from the game, black has a promising position and should not be afraid of the early Qxd4 by white.

For a more detailed analysis of this variation I refer you to Lev Alburt's book, Chess Openings for Black, Explained: A Complete Repertoire.