Chess Openings for Black – Dubov Tarrasch (Deep Dive)

Chess openings have been studied A LOT. And I really mean a lot.

Although some openings have been discussed in chess books back in the 15th century, chess openings have developed so much throughout the centuries (particularly since the 20th century) that former world champions like Jose Raul Capablanca and Robert James Fischer complained that chess was just becoming a game of memorization.

And I didn’t mention that fact that nowadays, with super powerful chess engines, we have the ability to analyze some opening lines pretty much to a forced win or draw.

But there’s still some hope…

While the engines have "killed" some lines that were acceptable in the past, we can use them to explore new positions that were ruled out in the past based on more general evaluations or because those moves might "feel wrong" to play.

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And a great example of this is a line that was popularized by Russian Grandmaster Daniil Dubov, a very creative player.

Engines allow us to be less dogmatic and the line that Dubov popularized in the Tarrasch Defense, known as the Dubov Tarrasch, would most likely be labelled as "positionally lost" in the past.

But chess has become a more dynamic game. Even if you get a terrible pawn structure in some lines, active piece play might easily justify it.

That’s why today I want to analyze the Dubov Tarrasch to learn a few ideas about how to study openings and how deep opening preparation can get.

We’ll also learn some general ideas about the Tarrasch defense like the pros and cons of the isolated d-pawn that Black normally gets.

Check out the lesson here: https://youtu.be/iOPa_WIdcXk