SC Week 6/7: Colour-Complexes, a third option (Black squares and White squares)

 "One of the arts of chess strategy is to recognise which of your pieces fit in well with the pawn structure and to exchange off the ones that do not."

Michael Stean

Today we have one more chance to catch up with game fragments and missed days before starting the final week.

The Black squares and White squares chapter of Simple Chess covers different kinds of strategies when dealing with square complexes of a particular colour. Although the route varies to get there varies, in essence Stean covers pawns fixed on a certain colour and trading off one of the opponent’s bishops. There is a third way, though, and that’s letting the opponent have the extra bishop.

In the late 80s and early 90s 1 d4 d6 2 Nf3 Bg4 was quite fashionable for a while. Particularly amongst British GMs like Miles, Speelman and Adams.

One line goes like this:-

1 d4 d6, 2 Nf3 Bg4, 3 c4 Nd7, 4 e4 e5, 5 Be2 Be7 and now, particularly after 6 d5 but also after moves like 6 Nc3 too, Black can go 6 … Bxf3 and 7 … Bg5. The idea is to trade somewhere on the c1-g5 diagonal and then attempt to profit from White’s remaining bishop being stuck behind the central pawns.

Here Black gets rid of both bishops. There’s a similar kind of plan when you keep one and get rid of the other. Develop a bishop, trade it off (preferably with some kind of extra advantage like doubling pawns or gaining time) and then fixing the central pawns on that same colour. It’s quite a common plan that crops up in a number of different openings. The Bogo-Indian and the Nimzo, for instance.

Stean doesn’t mention this kind of thing directly, although the Fischer - Spassky game from chapter 3 (Weak Pawns/3) is a good example of it.

Timman - Andersson from Tilburg 1977 is another.