Yeah I honestly would prefer the King Walk to the Perunovic.

I spent many months recently investigating the Benko and mostly discovered that if you want to stay in fianchetto territory and not go ...e6, you might as well just allow the King Walk. It would be hard to expound upon why easily.  The depressing thing for me is 5.e3 - not because it's a refutation, but basically because I don't find it thematic or all that fun to play against. 

Last time I checked it's a draw, Black just has to be precise if White is also very precise. My experience in online games is that people basically know very little, at least up to the lichess 2300-2400 level - I can't speak for beyond that. My score with the Benko is one of the highest (61%) out of all the 1.d4 defenses I've looked at, and I've probably studied it the least. 

The ...e6 lines are also decent and worth looking at, I just think it's weird to even really call it a Benko. I feel like most players will like one approach or the other but possibly not both.

Keano wrote on 12/10/25 at 00:46:32:

That could be the epitaph of every "interesting" black opening.

Engine analysis is a fact of life, the only saving grace is nobody can remember it all. The real question is not "what is the engine eval?". It is "if one of the players deviates, either by prepared N or forgetting or even just not knowing the line, which color has a harder time finding good moves?". Another issue is, if everybody played the same solid openings, white's memory load would be even lighter.

I've considered adding the Benko to my repertoire, but there's a couple of lines that give me pause, the king walk being one of them. At the moment I have one better defense and one worse defense, so the Benko might be an upgrade for my "interesting" choice, it's the meta considerations above I am not sure about.

an ordinary chessplayer wrote on 10/08/25 at 23:07:01:


No time old friend. 

Here's the video for the white 5.e3 course.

• https://youtu.be/owp9VZ0pS9E (07:53) White powerful solution against Benko

There were 27 courses released on the same date, probably some technical reason for that, but the "most aggressive" Benko video makes it clear the black course is later.

I don't suppose we will be seeing ask-fluffy.com any time soon, but Avrukh has some other contributors on his site. It wouldn't hurt to send an email and ask about conditions.

Ah, so Avrukh has such courses. All you get is a blurb though unless you buy the whole thing? There is also a course for White on 5.e5 against the Benko. And they were released the same day. I'll check the videos though. Thanks AB.

The Lichess still means nothing to me. Blitz games, who cares. I am old so I download TWIC, but even that is polluted by chessdotcom games. I really think Chessbase should have a filter by time control.

It seems that if I want a bad position, the King's Indian is 'enough'.

fluffy wrote on 10/06/25 at 20:23:35:

Sorry, I wasn't clear. The lichess database just crossed 7 billion games, so it can be very useful in gathering information on less popular lines, since even those frequently have a large number of games played. 

I would agree that I think most people's issue (mine included) with 5.e3 is not the theoretical verdict, which seems just about as formidable as anything, but the fact that it's tough to get "the Benko position". Probably checking out the Avrukh or Kotronias coverage of the ...g6 lines would be your best bet.