kylemeister wrote on 01/19/11 at 23:58:47:


Used to be commonly played long ago but along came the young Kasparov against Beliavsky and made the setup look dubious. Mind you it took Kasparov, and he made a lot of stuff look dubious.

TN wrote on 01/19/11 at 23:40:42:


Such a Tartakower, with ...ed instead of ...Nxd5, has long been considered suboptimal, as far as I know.

TMB = Tartakower - Makagonov - Bondarevsky System of the Queen's Gambit Declined: 1 d4 d5 2 c4 e6 3 Nc3 Nf6 4 Bg5 Be7 5 e3 O-O 6 Nf3 h6 7 Bh4 b6. 

In English-speaking countries it is most often just referred to as the Tartakower. The most respectable of the most respectable of openings for Black. Karpov relied on it in his first match with Kasparov, and Kasparov just hit a brick wall.

In fact, Petrosian, Spassky, Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, and Kramnik all used it, often in very important games. Matthew Sadler's QGD book has a good explanation, and there is a Black repertoire book coming out soon featuring it.

if you are a 1700 on chesscube then you are probably a 1400-1500 on USCF ie your time is better spent improving other areas than your opening play.

One might wonder, for example, what your rating is.

Jay wrote on 01/19/11 at 16:19:57:


There are several product lines that come close:

- ChessPublishing. It's one update per opening per month, so always reasonably up-to-date. If you need a more general overview there are playable ebooks that link to the games. You can still buy an everyman ebook as a starting point of course.

- Chessbase training DVDs (videos). Most of these come with a database of the the games/lines presented. But many of these are meant as quick overviews for beginners and so will give less depth than Everyman and especially ChessPublishing.

- Chessbase Magazine contains a number of opening surveys by strong players each issue (between 5 and 10 I think). But it's a bit hit and miss whether you get something that interests you. Some of these surveys are included in the yearly "Chessbase Opening Encyclopedia" but the surveys from recent years are usually not there, so I don't recommend this product.

The only ones with much choice are Everyman.
Alternatively you could look into the individual Chessbase stuff.

TBM is the QGD Tartakower.
Have you decided on Grunfeld?
First decision to narrow it is whether you prefer dark square (concentrating on d4/e5 square) such as KID, Grunfeld & Benoni's or White squares (e4/d5) such as QGD, Nimzo & QID.
What sicilian do you play? Does it involve a Bg7 fianchetto?