My first Pirc experience

In my short “career” playing chess I haven’t done too well as black playing against 1.e4I I went through some repertoires on Chessable playing 1…e5 but they never really work out for me. For some reason, I’m afraid to try out the Sicilian. I’ve never really understood it. That might be because I haven’t tried to, but I’ve never really tried to fully understand any opening up to now. That’s one of my problems. But let’s not go down that road right now.

I recently played a game against one of our trainers at my chess club. He played 1.d4 and I played 1…Nf6 and my defense turned into what he later told me was the Pirc setup. I badly lost that game, but I was intrigued that I, without any previous knowledge of Pirc, played it naturally. And he told me it is used mainly against 1.e4. That sparked my curiosity. Could this be the defense that I was looking for against 1.e4? I mean, if I played it naturally without ever knowing about it, maybe it’s my destiny… (I can hear Obi Wan right now: Tom… it is your destiny). I decided to take a closer look.

First, I searched on Chessable for a book on Pirc, because hey, where is the best place to learn an opening, if not on Chessable? But unfortunately no luck. I then started to enter my own research from games I found in ChessBase into a Chessable book that I made myself. But this was not very instructive since I didn’t know why certain moves were being made and others not.

Then, I watched all of the Pirc videos that I could find on Youtube and continued to enter in these variations into Chessable, but there are actually not that many videos about Pirc as you would think. I started to get the impression, that the Pirc was some kid of long forgotten weapon in chess that no one plays anymore and that if I could master it, I would be the most feared chess player in the Ming Dynasty… (I now hear Jackie Chan saying “just do it”).

So, I went back to ChessBase and looked up Pirc videos there. They also do not have much of a selection, but one of the videos caught my eye. It was done by Mihail Marin. I’ve never heard of the guy.

I googled him and found out that he is a GM from Romania and had a peek ELO of 2616 in 2009. He used to play Pirc exclusively for many years. He also just recently (2017) published a book on it “The Pirc Defence”.

I immediately put this on the Chessable book wish list. But my book suggestion didn’t get the resonance that I expected, especially considering that there are no Pirc books on Chessable (although it’s only been a week now). So being the impatient American that I am, I bought the actual book from Amazon for 25 Euros.

I’ve now created a new Pirc book in Chessable and am entering in the variations from Mihail Marin’s book. This takes a lot of time, but I’m learning more about the Pirc through Marin’s instructions and analysis than I was through Youtube videos and ChessBase database games. So I hope that by this time next year, I will have entered all of the variations from the book and already be an expert and have improved my rating by 1000 points. Ok, I would just be happy with 100 points ;-) Of course if Chessable wants to add this book right now to their offering, I won’t complain.

So that’s my short story about my first experience with Pirc. I’ll leave you with a funny anecdote: I was at my chess club last week and was going through the Pirc with our best player (he’s an FM with a 2300 rating) and I mentioned to him that I had just bought a book on the Pirc. He asked me (in his Romanian accent) if it was written by Mihail Marin. I said yes, why? He smiled and said that he is an old acquaintance of his and that they used to play on the same team.

The world of chess really is a small place, especially here in Germany.