Quote:I don't doubt that this is playable, but isn't a little counter-intuitive for Black to block in his/her c-pawn in the French? I thought the whole point of the French was to rip apart White's central pawn structure with c5. 3 ... Nc6 calls for another plan, and Black seems to be short of space...
Not so much counter-intuitive as downright anti-positional, according to classical theory! I can just imagine Tarrasch's look of distaste!
But modern chess is finding many such lines that give quite acceptable positions (and results) - for further examples, you just have to check out John Watson's two strategy books. In this case, the position after 3...Nc6 has a remarkably distinguished pedigree, including Nimzowitsch, Petrosian, Short and Morozevich. It's also related to the Closed Winawer systems with ...b6/Qd7 (i.e. without ..c5, and without ...Ba6) as in the famous game Olafsson-Petrosian, Bled 1961, a game which has somewhat greater affinity strategically with the King's Indian rather than the French.
But for examples of how Black gets play in this line (since ...c5 is not available in the early stages) you could do worse than checkout the games of Rozentalis, Reefschlaeger, Keitlinghaus, Zivoslav Nikolic, Hecht, Matlak and Chess Publishing's own Eric Prie, who played it a lot in the late 80s - early 90s.
PS Remember Tartakower's famous paradox:
"Dubious THEREFORE playable!"
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C10: Is 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 Nc6 playable? (Read 25373 times)
