The Difficult English
Submitted by
on Wed, 09/30/2009 at 8:01am.
The English opening (1. c4) has always annoyed me as black. Sometimes it leads to 1. d4 positions through transposition, sometimes it can even lead to a Maroczy Bind kind of position, and sometimes it leads to totally original positions not found in other openings. This means that you cannot just rely on your opening repertoire against 1. e4 and 1. d4 when facing 1. c4. And since I hate studying an opening I face like 5% of the time (or less) this means that I am usually out of book from move 1 :)
Today I played a game online against a GM who played this opening against me. Usually when facing the English I play a g6-f5-e5-d6 setup as black, with Nc6, Nf6, Bg7, O-O, Ncd7, c6. This is quite solid and it worked quite well in the game. After a complicated middlegame we reached a position with Q+R+R+B vs. Q+R+R+N which I think was ok for me. I had a potentially strong passed c-pawn while white was stuck with a backward e-pawn. Then after 30. Kh2 I saw a nice combination, which didn't work yet. Amazingly the GM completely missed it and finally allowed the nice finish with 34. Qd4??
Have fun playing through it :)