Descripción

The Modernized King’s Indian – Mar del Plata  The King’s Indian Defense, and the Mar del

Plata variation in particular, has played a huge role throughout my entire chess career. I started

doing extensive analysis of the ensuing rich positions  from a very young age. I believe what lured me

to it was that it is an outlier among well-established  openings in the sense that it gives Black a

chance to attack right from an early stage of the game. This  rather romantic approach to chess made

a deep impression and stayed with me for a long time. The  history of the line is well known – many

big King’s Indian experts used to play it frequently.

 

It was Gligoric who managed to devise the perfect setup for simultaneous attack and defense, which

completely revolutionized the King’s Indian as a whole, not only the Mar del Plata variation. Thanks

to that and also to significant theoretical contributions by other legends of the game such as

Bronstein and Boleslavsky, and later on Stein, Fischer and Kasparov, the King’s Indian was

established as one of the key battlegrounds of opening theory right to this day. I consider the King’s

Indian to be one of the last remaining areas of classical chess where engines are not omnipotent over

humans.

The Modernized King’s Indian – Mar del Plata 

 

The usual pattern is that engines will always strongly favor White from the beginning of the game,

but the entire point of the King’s Indian is to understand the deep nuances in closed positions. The

positions are so rich with hidden dynamics, yet complex enough that the lines are never too forcing.

The wealth of possibilities for both sides means that a strong understanding of chess is far more

important than knowing how an engine evaluates the position. When the game finally opens up and

the tactical fireworks erupt, it is essential that your pieces are correctly positioned for it. This

intuition only comes after much study and experience.

 

 

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