Know The Opening: The Najdorf: Episode 4

Today in our penultimate episode of "Know The Opening: The Najdorf" we'll check out 6. g3. As usual let's begin with a game that illustrates what we want to avoid.

Key Concepts

Some of these are ringing true through all variations wouldn't you say?

Modern Master

Here is a game from MVL (Maxime Vachier-Lagrave) demonstrating our key concepts.

I highly recommend checking out more of MVL's games in the Najdorf as he is quite possibly the best at it in the current era.

A Lesson From Fischer
This is lovely game from Bobby Fischer against 6. g3 where his opponent tries something a bit different. The recapture with the King (13. ... Kxe7) is everything we need to defend the validity of Key Concept 3. Watch how Fischer then rolls these pawns down the board to secure an easy win. 

Conclusion

At this point we should be familiar with overlapping key concepts within the variations and our comfort level should be rising in the position. In the last episode we'll look at two different variations actually, one positional and historically valid and the other known as a nuisance for Black but we'll see how we can deal with it calmly.