New Ideas In The Opening-Suggestions and Feedback

Feedback and Support
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Hello all,
Good evening,
Wish that you are doing well!
I just saw the brilliant lecture of Ntirlis Sir given on 27.2.2023. I could not attend the lecture live(as it was held on 27th February 11:30 PM IST and I was travelling in a train). First of all, I would like to thank @nikos.ntirlis Sir for his brilliant lecture, for being so updated in many King’s Indian lines and for giving us a very clear blueprint to work more upon.

I saw and observed that in the middle of the lecture as well as the end of the lecture, Ntirlis Sir asked for suggestions and said that he would like to know the suggestions and feedbacks on Twitter or on the Blog(I think he meant Forum). I tried to write to Nikos Sir on Twitter but to me, it seems he cannot be messaged. Nikos Sir in the lecture also said something along the lines of the following:

" I am not trying to go super-deep in these variations. I am trying to give a direction and a general blueprint. You can take this and incorporate this into your repertoire and analyse this much deeper".

I would like to tell how I think about this. I think if we are covering some lines that are a bit shoddy(like let’s say 1…b6 which is clearly not as principled or lets say the French and Modern Benoni), I think this may not be the ideal strategy. French because Sam Sir has very very often said that French is not as good an opening according to the Engines). Why I think this is is because a lot, lot of times, we have to walk a tightrope to make some of these lines playable. This happens very very often. Anish Giri has said this very often that the reason why French for example is not as popular as the Najdorf, Berlin etc. is because in the Najdorf or Berlin it is also equal but the margin of error is not as low. As far as I understand, if we have a 30-minute lecture on the Modern Benoni for example, we would merely be scratching the surface and understand the directions but would have half-baked knowledge. This is something I was wondering about.

This is another reason why I highly appreciate that Nikos Sir spent such a long time explaining us the intricacies of 1…b6. I hence believe that in some lines that are known to be not as objectively sound, we should spend more and more time to try and make the lines playable. I sort of feel that KID is also known to not be as theoritically sound according to the engine. For example, in the 5.Be2 6.Bg5 variation, we did not cover this at all(if I understand correctly). This may be because we did not cover it in detail. Also in the Saemisch, we did not cover 6.Nge2 as much which is one of the main lines. This I suppose may be because of paucity of time. I however do believe that the coverage of Saemisch KID was quite good as a whole ! :slight_smile:

This was one serious feedback I had. Also, we did not cover the Fianchetto KID as seriously I believe. We just saw it very briefly and fleetingly. This again comes down to having just 1 or 1.25 hours to cover the whole big opening about. Maybe if we have to cover such a long(and known to be not as objectively sound an opening) we can take 2 hours to cover it if that is fine.
Nikos Sir asked if we had a game we wanted to share. I have such a game. Can I share it with you Nikos Sir privately?
Thanking you,
Yours sincerely,
Aradhya Garg

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Hello all! Good evening! Wish that you are doing well!

First of all, I wanted to thank @nikos.ntirlis Sir for his wonderful lecture on the Najdorf Siccilian day before yesterday. I believe it was very interesting and he covered lines in great detail. He did say that he did not analyse 6.Rg1 h5!? almost at all and it is the third most popular line according to the database and that it is likely to be covered in the next lecture(s). That is fine. I understand.

I recall towards the very end of the lecture @Ntirlis Sir said what would we like to see for next week. I had a suggestion which I was thinking about quite quite a lot:

I observed that Anish Giri had the Semi-Slav Course by Shankland Sir. I observed that Giri had a lot, lot of ideas over the Semi-Slav course by Shankland Sir and improved upon those ideas and used it in his own games against quality opposition constantly. There are many many ideas about the same.

Another case in point is Joorden Van Foorest. He won Wijk Aan Zee 2021 some weeks after the Najdorf Course by Anish Giri had come out. He did mention that he had studied the course and prepared improvements over it. It is no doubt he won such a critical game against Grandelius in Wijk 2021 last round(!) to tie for first place and then win the Tiebreak against Anish as well.

Basically in both these examples, we found something that I think Sam Sir had said to us very often: Use the Chessable Courses as base material and then build on it much further. Could we take an example of a course which may be not as recent and quite a bit old(as @Ntirlis Sir or other members like) and how we can make improvements over it consistently?

I was asking also as the way I see it, I feel Chessable is the future and that there are more and more courses and more and more people getting involved in the community and that how to use Chessable properly and using a proper example and reference points of it is essential.

Wanted to know if something like this could be arranged.
Thanking you,
Yours sincerely,
Aradhya Garg

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When a strong player like Sam, or Giri write their opinion about an opening line, people take notice. This might be on Chessable, or any other course or book. I don’t think that Chessable is something special.

Covering the Semi-Slav in one of the next Monday lectures is definitely something that we need to do!

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