How to Crush the Sicilian Dragon

Have you ever wondered how to reply to the Dragon? Does the dark-squared bishop staring down the long diagonal frighten you? Today we're going to fix that.

The Sicilian Dragon is one of my favorite openings to play against, and there's good reasons for that. Most importantly, white has an obvious and undeniable kingside attack, and the plan is clear as day. We'll talk about that later on.

But before we go forward, remember that the Dragon is a sound opening. But both sides need to tread very carefully and play very accurately or they lose immediately. I don't want you to think that this post refutes the Dragon.

Anyway, let's look at some of the main lines of the Dragon. It can be reached by quite a few move orders, but the Dragon position is characterized by the fianchetto of the kingside bishop with the pawns on a7, b7, d6, e7, f7, g6, and h7. The reason it's called the Sicilian Dragon is because, first and foremost, it is a variation of the Sicilian, and the Dragon part is because some think that the pawn structure looks like the constellation Draco. Personally I think you have to have quite the imagination to see that. Here are a few ways you can reach the Dragon position:

The position above has been reached more than fifteen thousand times! The move 5...g6 is the defining move of the Dragon. From here there are a few different ways that white can play, but today we're going to learn the most common, most enterprising, most aggressive, and likely best way to play against the Dragon.

The Yugoslav Attack! White plays 6. Be3, which signals the Yugoslav.

Here's the general plan for white in the Yugoslav Attack. Black has a few different replies but this list is assuming he plays the most common main line.

1. Before taking any other action, white needs to play 7. f3 to prevent ...Ng4 harassing the bishop. Black couldn't have played this on move 6 because there was a trap winning a piece:
2. White wants to play Qd2 preparing to castle long. This move prepares Bh6, trading off blacks powerful dark-squared bishop, removing a critical defender and attacker for black. White castles long so that he can push the kingside pawns with reckless abandon and storm the black king.
3. Bc4 will be thrown in before or after Qd2. The bishop is a strong attacker, pinning the f7 pawn. However it will usually be traded off, I will explain why later.
4. Pawns storm! g4, h4, h5, and break open the kingside pawn cover.
5. Bh6, trading the bishop off like I said earlier. 
6. Open the h-file and bring in the major pieces to mate the black king!

That's the idealistic plan, but we can't forget that black will have counterplay on the queenside too. Now we will look at the main line and a few sidelines of the Yugoslav.

It's time for some example games! All three of the following games were played by me, all are 10|0 rated games. They are imperfect (especially the last two) but demonstrate the ideas well.

#1. I posted this game previously as one of the games in my "Best Games" series, so you may have seen it already, but for the purpose of this I am showing it again. This game and the next will show a common Bf8 sacrifice to open the h-file. The analysis may be a little bit irrelevant because it was done before writing this and not for this post, but you can learn a lot.

#2. I missed a lot of chances to mate my opponent in time pressure but in the end won anyway on material. This shows the same Bf8 sacrifice. It was another one of the games in my best games series.

#3. This one was not previously annotated and I didn't have much time to annotate today, so I lightly analyzed but you can look deeper if you want, it is a good game to do so. There were many mistakes by both players but shows a common Dragon attack.

There are a lot of other famous Dragon games which you can find using chess.com's database or Google. For example Fischer's defeat of the great Dane, Bent Larsen, at Portoroz 1958.