Trap (poisoned g5-pawn) in the main line of Najdorf

Here 13...Bxg5+ is bad for black (in almost all variations), I'll try to show it in the subsequent posts.

Many thanks, I am curious 👍

Hey, Andrea, I'll continue this evening and will post in your Oracle club forum too.

Wow, that would be just fantastic, I play the Najdorf when playing sicilian!! 

The most popular line:

and white has a serious advantage here (ev=+1.2, SF10+, d=22).

I think this was part of the reason I started playing 7...Qb6.

Indeed. Nice line. I too, play the PPV, but yeah in regards to 13. ... Bg5, I always thought it was pretty solid (although I used to play 13. ... Nc5 OTB just because it "seemed" more intuitive for me). Only thing about this line that bugs me is 18. ... fe6; I'm pretty lazy to seriously analyze the alternative branches (to taking back on e6) but I realize the Knight-fork makes for an arduous task. Reminds me of ye Old Bishop sac @ e6. Heh. Gotta have a backdoor! Anyways, cool. ✌🏽

13...Bxg5+ may not be the current trend (which is the bold 13...0-0!, fashionable due to the faithfullness to it by WC Ju Wenjun), but it is absolutely playable, and not "bad" by any means.

Actually the main reason of the decline in popularity of the old main line 7...Be7 is that Gelfand's line has been proven a better choice, both theoretically and statistically.

The shallowness of the post shows how "much" the O.P. knows about chess. The next posts he promised will just prove it...

Phew! ... it would be funny if my analyses as an intermediate player were deeper than yours as an IM.  

The Poisoned Pawn Variation. In this case, the pawn b2 is poisoned.

13...Nc5 might be slightly better than 13...Bxg5+. However, the unique optimal move is 13...O-O! and white has no advantage at all. Our local sarcastic IM pfren said that this line was popularized by the current WWCC Ju Wenjun.

Black could play 18...Kh8 as an alternative to 18...fxe6 but it's also bad. For example:

and black is obliged to take 20...fxe6 or to come under an even stronger attack with 21. h5! (20...Bxh4? is bad too).

I just tried to analyze the Wenjun's line 13...O-O and, indeed, the exclamation sign is probably exaggerated. It's pretty straightforward and white has an advantage (usually unsufficient to win the game):

There are 82% of draws in this position.

You may try to find improvements for white over this game.

So far 20...g6 has been played in several games, and Black is doing OK.

LoL Black wasn't ok at all, it suffered and desperately struggled for the survival. After 36. Nxe1 white has  the queen+knight vs. queen+2 pawns. Black had a big chance to make a draw in this game.  

You fail to realise that this ending is not trivial at all to play with either color in regular chess, and white may well lose this if he is not on the alert.

And I've already said that there are several (more than 20) games played like that- I leave it to the lazy people like you to find them.

Indeed. Thanks guys. Very nice game @IMphren. I can see yigor's point, in a practical sense too. As it is, I feel somewhat relieved by how resilient this line can be despite white's sharp (slashing) lines. Awaiting more updates 😉

I'm playing at another site for money, dude.

Whenever I win enough $, I will buy you a nice book for kids for your birthday.