Najdorf Variation

Day 63

Leave a Comment / Climb To 2000, Najdorf Variation, Sicilian Defense /

Rating 1829

Puzzle Rush Score 33

Daily Study I played over one Bobby Fischer game from his book My 60 Memorable Games. I came away with a few takeaways about the game.

  • In these Najdorf lines it is important to consider trading the dark squared bishop for the knight on b6 so that it can’t jump to a4 or c4. Fischer suggests this move in his annotations and it was the top engine choice.
  • If you are going to give your opponent a passed pawn you may want to take another think about the position. 29.Nxe5 gives black a passed pawn and Fischer suggests that his opponent should not have done this. The funny thing is that I thought that was the top move for white and then I read the annotations. I clearly didn’t think deeply enough about the position.

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Learning The Najdorf

Leave a Comment / Blitz, Najdorf Variation, Sicilian Defense /

I have always played the Sicilian Defence, but as the years have passed I have forgotten quite a bit of theory on the opening. The Sicilian gives black winning chances as the imbalanced positions are often double edged. If you take a wrong step in the opening you often get crushed (or have an awful backward pawn to deal with) and this is what has been happening to me (a lot!) as I look to relearn the Sicilian Defence.

The variation I have been looking at over the past few days is the Najdorf variation. This is a very popular line that can lead to some crazy positions.

Check out the position between Fabiano Caruana and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave from their most recent match up in the Sinquefield Cup.

I have been trying to play this opening in all of my blitz games and so this month I have played 9 games in the Najdorf variation. I won 3, drew 1 and lost 5. Clearly there is still a bit of learning to do!

Here is a game that given more time I may have won. It was a fun game though and the best example of the classic queenside attack with b5 to b4.

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It Has Been a While!

Leave a Comment / Boris Gelfand, Fabiano Caruana, Najdorf Variation, Sicilian Defense /
Hello all!
I haven’t posted something chess related in quite some time.
I have had some chess down time and only started playing games again a few months back.
 
I thought I would post one of my correspondence games that I have played on Gameknot recently as I really enjoyed it!
I was inspired by a game between Caruana and Gelfand, played at the 8th Tal Memorial this year. You can view that game below.
 

 

The game above was an exciting example of the Sicilian Najdorf variation and I wanted to give it a go! My game just happened to follow the same variation, the moves are not quite identical but reach the same position all the way to move 17. After that I made some mistakes as did my opponent, but I ended up with a nice mating attack to win the game.

 

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