kylemeister wrote on 06/27/19 at 16:48:43:


The weird thing with 6.Bc4 is it seems to make one of Black's other plans stronger: ...Bg4 to get rid of a minor piece, followed by ...Nbd7, ...a6 and usually ...Ne8-c7, playing for the ...b5 break but also sometimes ...f5.

I have struggled with White against that plan even in its most common version (with White playing Be2), and it looks like White will lose time compared to that with Bc4 and Qxf3 because he probably doesn't want to allow ...Ne5xc4. So I'm skeptical. But I will take a look at what Sielecki has to say about 6.Bc4.

ErictheRed wrote on 06/25/19 at 15:58:11:


Grunfeld is met by 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 g6 3.g3 Bg7 4.Bg2 0-0 5.0-0 d5 6.c4 with typical play for this line.

King's Indian is (after the above moves) 5...d6 6.b3.

Benoni and Benko are avoided, instead he goes into commonly recommended anti-Indian systems against them, but with his own twist.

Benoni is met by 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 c5 3.d5 g6 4.Nc3 Bg7 5.e4 d6 and now he recommends the new 6.Bc4!? with the idea of discouraging ...e6

Benko is met by 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 c5 3.d5 b5 4.c3!? Instead of the usual 4.Bg5, although Bg5 usually follows at some stage.

Thanks everyone for advising me on how Chessable works. So I took the plunge and bought it! For an existing 1.d4 2.Nf3 player this repertoire is potentially of great value to me. Sure, I would prefer a paper book to the MoveTrainer, but as I couldn’t wait for it to be printed (November, I think) I decided to try out Chessable. I don’t regret my purchase.

If anyone wants to know what he recommends against any particular variation then please ask away. I won’t give any analysis away but will share the main repertoire choice.

As far as ‘Keep it Simple’ goes, this book is very different from the 1.e4 book. That one gave clear pawn structures and plans against each black response. 1.d4 is quite the opposite - though our initial moves are the same 1.d4, 2.Nf3 3.g3 etc there are transpositions into other openings everywhere. Clear plans are often sidelined in cases where Black sharpens the play at the outset, resulting in often obscure and non-typical pawn structures that are uncommon (in my experience) for a traditional 1.d4 player. It’s very much an ‘Avrukh-lite’ repertoire; there’s a huge amount of material to work through.

If you are attached to your d-pawn and like a typical presence in the centre with the pawn occupying d4 or d5 you will find a lot of the recommendations go against the grain. The pawn will often be exchanged off by a ...c5 from Black, often with your pawns still on c2 and e2, so don’t think it’s just an English. Sometimes with dxc5 from White, sometimes allowing ...cxd4 into Reversed Grunfeld setups. These positions are very unique to this repertoire and make full use of the specific delayed c4 move order Sielecki recommends. That in mind, there’s a decent case for entering the repertoire via 1.Nf3, 2.g3, 3.Bg2 and only deciding to play d4 in some cases, or even go into a Symmetrical English if you prefer that to the recommended positions where your d-pawn gets exchanged off so early.

It’s a good repertoire and I look forward to trying it out more online and eventually over the board. I can’t wait for the book to be published though as I find this way of absorbing the information much easier. In the meantime I’ll stick the rep into my own ChessBase files as I learn it.

Stigma wrote on 06/14/19 at 09:24:43:


I fully agree. You volunteer for courses you are interested in and in my experience most issues that are raised will be  addressed during beta testing. So a >= 4 star rating should not be a surprise. But even so one of my reviews was pretty negative about the course it discussed and I also gave only one 5 star rating so far.

One additional point is that there are no guidelines I know of that tell you how to decide whether a course deserves a 1-, 2-, 3-, 4- or 5-star rating. I believe most reviewers tend to be a little bit too generous when in doubt.

My suggestion is to look at the pro and con sections most reviews contain and check other reviews by the same reviewer. Then you get a better idea of how strict or generous the given reviewer is.

winawer77 wrote on 06/14/19 at 12:07:39:


If you mean that if they give you a .pgn or .cbv download file, no, you have to move pieces on your own each line with its programme.

I believe that there is tree section where you can look at what the lines are as an overwiew. But this is not the same as when you going through lines like in ChessBase where you scroll your cursor to get through the moves.

I'm not so familiar with Chessable either, but this will be published in book format later this year (I assume by New in Chess) so you can have a standard paper book with this format if you can wait.

I’m very interested in this repertoire as it’s a perfect way of avoiding Benko/Benoni/Grünfeld (among other things) without having to resort to d-pawn specials all the time. This repertoire could solve many problems for me before I  just switch to 1.c4 entirely.

However, I’ve never used Chessable, and I’ve had some difficulty in finding out what it’s like. Is everything done through the MoveTrainer program, or is there any traditional analysis like you would expect in ChessPub, for example? Is there a book/index to search for a specific variation, for example?

Apologies if these questions are a little off-topic, but the website (at least to me) doesn’t make it as clear as I apparently need it to be.

Thanks Stigma, that is very enlightening. It is only sensible to want to review things where you have an interest/ background expertise.