Endangered Species: Dutch Defense, Part 3

We've already looked at how Kasparov defanged the Dutch Defense as white against Nigel Short. It only seems appropriate, then, to examine how Karpov approaches the Dutch Defense as White. It should be noted that neither player has a single game listed on this site where they play it as Black.

Typical Karpov -- I'm not completely surprised he has never played the dutch. In fact, a while ago I was surprised to learn that Karpov actually did give the King's Indian a try -- 99.9% of the time he is on the other side. Thanks for sharing!

Karpov and Kasparov are actually very similar in terms of how they approach the first two moves of a game- they stay within what they know are the strongest/ most reliable/ orthodox openings. I remember reading Kasparov's book about the Moscow Marathon. The two of them knew the standards, and they knew them in-depth. It was all about whichever openings offered the best chances, even from the first move. The Dutch would not have been considered by them.

Yes... it's interesting how different this approach is compared to Carlsen! Carlsen seems almost as casual as a club player when it comes to openings. Ok, that is an exaggeration -- Carlsen certainly must do some decent preparation too, but it is really striking how he can disregard the tradition of 30 move openings preparation, and still both win the world championship, and by far have the highest rating!

Well, I've only really seen him do that in rapid and blitz games (though he is ready to do so in those games). Also, I've never heard of an opening being analyzed past 20 moves (unless we are counting reference games as move analysis, in which case, yes I have).

There are cases of at least analysis going on into the high 20s, and probably deeper than that -- I'll try to give you an example when I have time.

That'd be great! I know there was a famous game where one player had analyzed a Caro Kann line about 32 moves deep in preparation for a game against another gm.