A better recipe against the London System

A better recipe against the London System

Avatar of thechesscorner64
| 0

The London system is very popular; White plays 1d4 and follows with Nf3 and Bf4. Then e3,h3 0-0 and it is not easy to fight for a win with Black.

Recently, I discovered the "explore games" function in www.chess.com

Lets say I like to play ..e6,..b6,..Bb7 to echo the Nimzo-Indian or Queen's Indian theme.

We reach the following position : 

Essentially you put the openings explorer and it shows your stats ( or the ones from a player of your choice).

Interestingly 5..c5 shows bad results for me with White winning 67% of the time. 

But you can see 5..d6 and 5..h6 are much better for me.

So lets first see a typical loss with 5..c5

As you can see, my opponent tricked me with Nc4!? and I have a weakness on d6. I fell into a classic London trap and lost badly.

_____________________________________________________________________________

But can we turn this around, and play for tricks ourselves ?

Let's see a game with this 5..d6



and here's another game starting with 5..h6


____________________________________________________________________________

For a way to play this without going for a sharp battle, but avoiding 5..c5 here's a top GM game