I suggest you play the Dragon against as high a competition you can find. Maybe you will bring it back.
Sicilian dragon, falling down
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It is a very risky opening to play and these days, top players are avoiding lines like that in favor of 1...e5.
As for the Najdorf, I find it to be less risky than the Dragon (especially the f3 h5 line thats getting popular these days) Black delays white's pawn storm and can often keep his king in the center for a while.
In the Najdorf, I think Black often also has more defensive resources like castling by hand, playing g6,Bf8,etc.
But that doesn't mean the Dragon is bad.....As you said, its working quite well for you and that alone should keep you playing it :P
Its just that at the top level, players don't want to take any unneccesary risks these days. This is also one of the reasons d4 is being seen more now--b/c of Ruy Lopez Berlin Def and Petroff's Defense. It simply offers more winning chances at that level.
But who knows, I have a feeling that we will see e4 in this years World Championship match.....
Radjabov, Nakamura, Carlsen, and Gashimov have used it recently in serious chess, and Aronian used it in rapid.
There are "yugoslav attack" type plans for White in the Pirc and King's Indian too. I found they are vastly overrated and I guess it's roughly the same in the Dragon. Many white players, who have usually read about these attack schemes in repertoire books for White, don't really know what to do beyond "threatening" Bh6. Black just shouldn't be too slow in applying pressure himself on the queenside, but otherwise he should be ok.
uhohspaghettio wrote:
Bubatz wrote:
There are "yugoslav attack" type plans for White in the Pirc and King's Indian too. I found they are vastly overrated and I guess it's roughly the same in the Dragon. Many white players, who have usually read about these attack schemes in repertoire books for White, don't really know what to do beyond "threatening" Bh6. Black just shouldn't be too slow in applying pressure himself on the queenside, but otherwise he should be ok.
It's not "roughly the same in the Dragon" at all, because Black has only two pawns on his queenside and has to resort to a minority attack. In those openings black has a full set and will form a strong phalanx of pawns and is a lot more likely to drown white if he tries to castle queenside. Those aren't yugoslav attack plans, they're "castling queenside and trying to storm the kingside" attack plans.
That depends on the level of abstraction. I wouldn't dispute those differences, of course. Actually, the missing c-pawn and White's ability to play Bc4 is what kept me from switching from Pirc to Sicilian Dragon some time ago. But in the Dragon Black may use the half-open c-file and - like you yourself said - can go for a minority attack. That's still applying queenside pressure to me (and that's all I said he should do).
As someone who plays the Najdorf and had never tried the Dragon or the Accelerated, this post made me curious. And the timing of this post was good because a couple of days later a couple of articles on the dragon popped up on the front page of the site. So i gave it a go, and regardless of the flaws or potential it has or hasn't depending on individuals opinion, for me its a hell of a lot of fun to play. So thank you to the OP for making me want to give it a go:)
Why has this opening stopped being played by top GMs (except Carlsen), I really ask myself sometimes, I can barely find ways that white can escape his faith, ebcause this opening lets you attack as black, not only defend :S, i use this opening and manage to defeat 2300+ fide players despite i am only 14, Is it a codex? I dont see a way for white to stop blacks pawn rush and sacrifices, as far as i play it, especially yugoslav i havent lost a signle game in it, Why? people dint know it or something else?
I know it had awesome reputation in era of kasparov but nowadays everyone likes najdorf while i think that one is weaker. Please post if you know the answer. Thank you.