tapchess wrote on 03/02/18 at 10:46:35:
Therefore at club level putting a small effort on this opening will probably provide outstanding results when playing with Black because most people will be unable to manage the resulting positions.
I agree. I wanted to add another opening to my repertoire that was a different type of game to my usual fianchetto stuff.
I settled on the Tarrasch because:
1. I had some books already to get me going
2. There was a nice new GM repertoire on it
3. It's a pretty much universal defense to all but 1. ..e5
4. It's not got a lot of pawn formations to assimilate (IQP and you're pretty much there

)
5. It's a light square defence, whereas KID and co. are dark square defences, a completely different type of game.
6. I was able to get up and running pretty quickly with it for internet hacking.
In practice, my long play results, although not a large sample so far, have been near enough to par.
I tend to think of it a bit like the KID in one respect though, i.e. you are positionaly worse and so have to mix it up somehow. With the Tarrasch I try to play as actively as possible!
I also don't mind suffering a worse IQP end game (it's not always lost), as long as my opponent isn't Karpov
I had a psychologal set back early on, being on the receiving end of a nasty 6. ...dxc5 surprise

, but I've done some work on that, so it's not the end of the world for Black there IMHO.