Today we present a great trap against the King’s Indian Defense.
It is always a pleasure to host a guest post by Grandmaster Alex Colovic and I know his wise words are always popular with our readers.
The King’s Indian Defense (‘KID’) is a very popular choice for club and tournament players. Major inspirations include World Champions Mikhail Tal, Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov. It is somewhat rarer these days at the very highest of levels but remains a standard fallback choice when meeting anything other than 1 e4.
Alex presents a notable and potent trap which recently caught out another World Champion.
Over to Alex for the full story…
A Great Trap Against the King’s Indian Defense
I first noticed the following trap in the online games of Hikaru Nakamura.
When playing online with the white pieces Nakamura often chooses to play automatic chess, setting up a so-called “scheme”. He starts the game with 1.Nf3 and 2.b3/e3 or 1.b3 and then Bb2, e3, Nf3 etc. basically playing a Queen’s Indian reversed with the choice in the middlegame to play with d3 and c4 (a reversed Hedgehog) or d4 and c4.
One of the most popular openings (and not only online) is the King’s Indian and Nakamura’s move-order is perfectly tailored to catch the automatic KID players.
The first player to fall into the trap when playing with Nakamura, believe it or not, was Magnus Carlsen!
You are probably curious by now, so let me show you the moves leading to the trap:
After 1.Nf3 (as mentioned, White can start with 1.b3 as well) Nf6 2.b3 g6 3.Bb2 Bg7 4.e3 0-0 5.d4 many KID players automatically play 5…c5 here, which is logical, undermining the pawn on c4 since the move …e5 is not possible.
Yet this natural move loses a pawn.
After the simple 6.dxc5 it turns out that after 6…Qa5 7.c3! Black cannot regain the pawn with 7…Qxc5 in view of 8.Ba3 and the pawn on e7 is lost once the queen moves from c5.
What a great trap, isn’t it? The most attractive part of it is that it appears completely unassuming, after all how can a natural move like 5…c5 be a mistake that early on in the game?
Impressive List of Victims
Using this trap Nakamura has caught the following grandmasters: Carlsen, Mamedyarov, Giri, So, Andreikin, Sadhwani and Ovetchkin. An impressive list and except for that game with Carlsen, which he lost, Nakamura won all the other games.
Other grandmasters who have fallen into this trap are Cheparinov, Alekseenko, Matamoros and Sorokin. Just to stress how “humble” the trap is, the young Indian promise Sadhwani fell into it twice!
What amazes me most is that ever since the game with Carlsen in January 2018 strong grandmasters keep falling into the trap playing with Nakamura. In the summer of that same year I recorded the video how to prepare against the KID in 10 minutes (you can also see it here on my YouTube channel – apologies for the poor video quality, it was recorded in a hotel in Salobrena, Spain) and it included this trap.
Today, and in particular in online chess, it is all about practical choices. While it’s nice to win quickly, the good aspect of this trap is that it is based on a sound positional basis – if Black doesn’t fall for it White can continue to play normally and obtain a good middlegame.
The next opponents who try the King’s Indian Defense could be in a lot of trouble!
Grandmaster Colovic’s Chessable courses can be found here.
