The Slav by GM Magesh and GM Arun

A world championship provides so much learning material for any chess fan. The opening novelties, the middle game struggle, the endgame technique and the psychological warfare and so on. One major aspect of these matches is that they rewrite the opening books. Both teams come up with so many novel ideas in their opening struggle. Given that you face the same person over and over again, a single novelty is never enough when it comes to a world championship. Hence they improvise as the match goes, come up with more improvements and essentially create a new dimension to an opening. In the current championship we have seen two such openings that have been put to the test, the Catalan and the Slav. 

Today we can take a look at one of the variations in the Slav. This particular variation is a deviation from what has been used by Anand in this championship. Interestingly our first game is from the World Champion himself, but in this case on the other side of the board.

Black sacrifices a piece for three pawns and an open king. If you take a look at the database the results would make it clear that black does not stand much of a winning chance against proper defense from white. A majority of the games at the top level have been a draw with occasional white wins.

In our second game in the battle of the 'chuk's, Onischuk came out on top of Grischuk.

Interestingly in the first game white targeted the a7 pawn and in the second game white targeted the h7 pawn showing a clear pattern for white's strategy. We hope our readers enjoyed these two instructive games and learned some important ideas of the Slav defense.