Chigorin Defense Help

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Avatar of wbbaxterbones

Hey everybody, I am coming back to chess after a 2 year break. I was a 1600 OTB player after 3 years of playing before i stopped, and since coming back my Chess.com rating has gone up by 2-300 points.

 

I am a tactical player who loves attacking and active play. I recently picked up the king's gambit and really enjoy it while finding success. I have been looking for an active, unbalanced opening with active play and few drawish lines against d4, and the Chigorin seems to fit the bill.

 

All of the articles I have read on it and Ben Finegold's Chess.com videos on the opening have been really useful and have taught me to play the style and positions in the middlegame, and have excited me and gotten me ready to learn. I get a lot of the ideas and thematic piece placements and weak squares and such and am continuing to learn.

What I want is for some suggestions to actually learn the moves. I can just use game explorer and wing it as far as picking my lines, but I'd like to know if you all know of any good resources for learning the Chigorin (Especially free online ones lol).

Please don't say "don't learn moves learn the ideas" because I am coming to learn the theory only after exploring everything else first. 

Thanks for all the help.

TLDR: Any good resources for learning actual lines in the Chigorin? Not the ideas but lines.

Avatar of JonHutch

The Chigorin is great. The app in Apple App Store called "chessrepertoire" has many openings that you can practice including the Chigorin. It's free for about 100 positions that you can do over and over for memorization. There's also articles by GM BryanSmith here on chess.com that I liked about the Chigorins history. It has a few classical games played by Mikhail Chigorin himself with stories about his life.

Avatar of varelse1

I am told the best book on the Chigorin is The Chigorin Defense According to Morozevich. Hard to get ahold of, I inheirited a copy. Is quite impressive.

Avatar of Hadron

Well, I am going to tell you something you don't want to hear. There is little or no point in charging off to learn lines of a complex defence like the Chigorin if you don't want to understand what you are trying to acheive with each move.

Anyone who has ever gone near to the Chigorin will tell you it is not a A+B+C+D = victory. It is a complex opening that deals in not only peice placement but the power of a peice to control certain square (as in K v B positions), square strength and other such hyper-modern concepts.

I have all the books....Watson, Lane & Moroevich....and you can still get it wrong...


 

Avatar of Eternal-Patzer2

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