Tuesday, January 02, 2007

French Defense, Exchange Variation

Jim West has an interesting post on playing the Exchange Variation against the French Defense. He does not dwell much on Steve Stoyko's favorite anti-Exchange system with delayed castling, which was demonstrated effective in West-Stoyko, Mount Arlington 2005 and Milekhina-Stoyko, US Amateur Teams East 2006 (both annotated at our site).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Stoyko's 4. ... Bg4 is dubious according to Kasparov - the 6. Qe2+! line with a later g4 leads to a position where black will be slower to develop, since the Qe7 and Bg6 inhibit the Bf8, whilst the Bf1 has the natural Bg2, if I recall correctly. Kasparov should have beaten Short with this line back in Tilbury 1991 in fact (?) but blundered at the last, according to his analysis in the relevant Informator.