Scarblac wrote on 10/10/13 at 08:30:20:

Yes.

tony37 wrote on 10/09/13 at 22:08:57:


No, he starts at move 4. But Avrukh does in GM Rep 11.

kylemeister wrote on 10/02/13 at 16:01:41:


I missed the early moves live, but he was definitely behind on the clock when I came in around move 15. The position at move 9 is known from a Bg5 move order but, like you, I can't find any previous instance of 9...b5 there. 

10.Bxb5 looks critical. White has the advantage that the usual response to that in the MML is Nxe4 which is not possible here. On the other hand, white is one move further away from 0-0 than he would be there so that might explain Tomashevsky's choice of 10.Nf3. 

So there are two ways of looking at this from a theoretical perspective. In the game move order, 9...b5 is the actual TN but after 10.Nf3 we have transposed to the position after 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 c5 3.d5 e6 4.Nc3 exd5 5.cxd5 d6 6.e4 g6 7.Nf3 Bg7 8.h3 0-0 9.Bd3 b5 if white plays the weird novelty 10.Bg5!?

Another day, another Benoni in Paris. Tomashevsky-Grischuk transposed to a MML where white has met 9...b5 with the odd 10.Bg5. Petrov doesn't mention this and as far as I can tell, it has never been played before via the normal MML order. It certainly looks a bit irrelevant when you follow the standard order. Hard to say whether this is a new idea from Tomashevsky  or if he just got move ordered. Not sure I would have played Grischuk's 11...Qe8 though.

I'm not impressed with his coverage of the Kapengut variation at all, to be honest.  He misses White's best moves at a few key junctures completely.  

I haven't looked closely at the rest of the book, but this should pose literally no problems to my repertoire, as my lines aren't even covered!  Admittedly the Kapengut is not very popular, so the rest of the book may be much better. 

No, but if you search for Quality Chess Blog + Semkov it certainly will appear .

@ gramsci

Somewhere on their blog they wrote it will be covered in the next newsletter. The last newsletter also had some lines reported as missing by some readers.