The Modernized King’s Indian – Mar del Plata

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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.

 

 

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