Starting out with the Grunfeld

Starting out: the grünfeld

Recently I have been reading about the grünfeld defense against 1. d4, which is supposed to give black a dynamic game with lots of attacking chances. I consider myself to be a fan of tactical play (which is why I usually open 1.e4) and this might therefore be a good opening for me.

In this blog I'd like to show the game where Ernst Grünfeld introduced the line against no lesser opponent than Alexander Alekhine. He won (apparantly Alekhine wasn't too happy about that) and many players (including Alekhine) adopted the line afterwards.

I have used the comments from Jacob Aagaard as given in the nice book "Starting out: the Grünfeld" (Published by EVERYMAN CHESS). Most of the annotations are mine however, and I was assisted by Deep Fritz 11. The rating of Alekhine and Grünfeld is based on the historical ratings calculated by the excellent chessmetrics' website.

Enjoy the game!