FreeRepublic wrote on 05/19/21 at 13:10:34:
Paddy wrote on 05/18/21 at 22:56:49:
It almost certainly came as no surprise to Botvinnik, who will have noted that Petrosian had already played it against Taimanov in 1959 and Gligoric in 1961. He will also have noted that Fischer played it in his famous game against Bertok in the 1962 Stockholm Interzonal.
I was not familiar with the Bertok-Fischer game. I found it at Chessgames.com. I am surprised that Fischer played the QGD so often as black (28 games), having associated him with the King's Indian Defense.
Fischer included the Bertok game in My 60 Memorable Games - still well worth reading IMHO!
The evolution of Fischer's black repertoire is quite interesting. Against 1 e4 he experimented with 1...e5 for a short while in the early 60s. Very occasionally he used the Sicilian and there was one Pirc in the 1972 match with Spassky. But otherwise his choice rested overwhelmingly on the Sicilian - the Najdorf, when White allowed it, with one experimental 2...e6 game towards the end of the 1972 match with Spassky.
Fischer's response to 1 d4 was much more varied. He played the King's Indian throughout his career, but it is well known that he feared the Saemisch for a long time and sometimes chose something other than the KID (usually the Gruenfeld) if he suspected that his opponent wanted to play 5 f3.
In the mid- to late- fifties Fischer was greatly influenced by Lipnitsky's book Questions of Modern Chess Theory, from which he picked up the Ragozin (one of Fischer's worst-scoring openings).
In the early 1960s he seems to have gone through a sort of brief "classical phase", perhaps under the influence of Spassky [whom he admired, and not just for his smart dressing
], so, at the same time as we see him trying 1 e4 e5 as Black, we also see some games of his with the Queen's Gambit Declined, mainly the Tartakower and the Semi-Tarrasch.
Roughly from the mid 1960s to 1972 we see more Nimzos, but also the odd Gruenfeld and Modern Benoni.
For his comeback match against Spassky in 1992 Fischer introduced the Queen's Gambit Accepted into his repertoire for the first time.
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How playable is the QGD Exchange for black? (Read 35260 times)
