Note: In this post, I am going to introduce/promote my own Chessable course titled The Modern Defence Against Everything. If you are unfamiliar with Chessable, you might want to check this review of the website I wrote some time ago.
Table of Contents
Introduction
In March 2019 I listened to the 120th episode of the Perpetual Chess Podcast featuring John Hartmann, a book reviewer for Chess Life Magazine and editor of Chess Life Online.
In the episode, Hartmann talked about his career as a chess book reviewer and offered advice to all aspiring chess writers. Among other things, he said it is worth to „try and knock on other people’s doors“.
I decided to heed his advice and sent a bunch of emails. One of them landed at the email adress of the Chessable staff. The first thing we discussed was writing some blog posts, which ultimately resulted in the afore-mentioned Chessable review, as well as Keep It Simple: 1 d4 review.
However, more importantly – in the initial email I pitched them several ideas for potential Chessable courses. A repertoire for my favourite opening for the Black pieces – the Modern Defence – was among them. They liked it the most, I also had nothing against doing it 1 and as they say – the rest is history. After some iterations, working on the repertoire in the summer of 2019 and 6 months later, on 10.02.2020, my first Chessable course titled The Modern Defence Against Everything was published!
In this post, we will take a closer look at my first Chessable repertoire.
First, I will talk briefly about the Modern Defence – the philosophy behind the opening and how I started playing it. Then, I will talk about the course itself – the organization, the structure, covered variations, etc. Finally, now that it is all finished, I would like to look back and offer my current perspective of the repertoire – with which aspects I am very content, but also, what is something I think I could have done better.
Hope you will enjoy it! 🙂
About the Modern Defence
The Modern Defence – Introduction
The Modern Defence is opening characterized by Black playing the move 1…g6 irrespective of what White does. However, it is most often played as a reply to the move of the king’s pawn 1 e4 (although The Modern Defence Against Everything also covers the lines arising after 1 d4 g6):
The Modern Defence belongs to the group of Hypermodern openings. Black is content with developing on his own side of the board and violates the classical rules about fighting for the center. He allows White to grab space and advance his pawns unhindered. Black delays the clash of the forces and claims that White’s strong center might become vulnerable and provide him with serious counter-attacking chances.
The Modern Defence is also known as Robatsch – named after Austrian grandmaster and botanist Karl Robatsch who popularized it in the 1950s and 60s.
The philosophy behind the Modern Defence. The resulting positions, nature of play?
As mentioned above, the Modern Defence is a counter-attacking opening. Black allows White to occupy the center and then aims to undermine it and destroy it with energetic play.
As a consequence, the Modern is all about sharp, tactical, fighting chess. It is messy. It’s full of wild combinations and sacrifices. It is ideal for a player who excels when there is a chaos on the board, for a fervent follower of Mikhail Tal’s maxim that you need to „You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one“.
The following game between Croatian GM Zoran Jovanović and Hungarian GM Richard Rapport is a perfect example:
Of course, playing in such a manner does entail a certain risk. Allowing your opponent a lot of space leaves the possibility of getting suffocated open. In double-edged positions, the value of each move is very high – one step in the wrong direction might lead to an opening disaster.
Fortunately, this is also true for White. When the play is so concrete and sharp, the moves he has to find are often very demanding. In order to punish Black’s provocative strategy, White has to play energetically and vigorously.
As you will see, most critical lines are extremely sharp and often include various sacrifices. Unless he is very well prepared, 8/10 times, an average club player will avoid the most critical lines in favour of normal moves.
The problem is that routine play, characteristic of lower-rated players, often allows Black to seize the initiative.
Even if he doesn’t take over, he has chances of outplaying the opponent from an equal position, since he should be more familiar with the resulting positions and structures.
How did I start playing the Modern Defence?
The Modern Defence has been my main opening with the Black pieces for the last couple of years. Since it is an odd opening choice to build your repertoire around, perhaps I should explain how I picked it up.
I started playing tournament chess relatively late in my life ( when I was 19 ). Even though I did play a lot on the Internet beforehand and read a number of books, I had really poor opening knowledge and didn’t really know how to study this phase of the game or build a repertoire. Once I started playing, I didn’t want to play one of the main lines. My ( twisted ) reasoning was as follows:
It is more difficult to pick up a line with a lot of theory as an adult and learn it from scratch compared to playing it from your early years and gradually expanding it.
Other players at my level are more likely to have a better knowledge of the main lines. For the first year or so, I played the Alekhine defense exclusively. But since tactical play is my strong suit, I wasn’t satisfied with passive and dry positions I often got out of the opening.
I started searching for something sharper, while still being reluctant to pick up something like the Sicilian. That is when I stumbled upon the book by a Swedish Grandmaster Tiger Hillarp Persson titled: Tiger’s Modern, devoted to – yes, you guessed it – the Modern Defence. Persson has been the leading Modern specialist for several years and later he wrote a revised edition called the Modern Tiger ( which, surely enough, I also got). Tiger’s treatment of the opening was based on the little pawn move a6, leading to the quick queenside expansion with b5-Bb7-Nd7-c5.
I was immediately attracted to the opening. Material sacrifices, imbalances and wild tactics – all an integral part of this opening – appealed to me very much. I went through the book, picked up some variations, and started playing it – with decent results.
5 years later and approximately 200 ratings higher, it is still my main defense.
Is the Modern Defence only suitable for club level players?
The Modern Defence is particularly effective at the club level. But it is not played at the club level exclusively.
Apart from Tiger Hillarp Persson, several grandmasters, like Zurab Azmaiparashvili, Stuart Conquest, Colin McNab, and Chatabalshev Boris have employed it regularly. The hero of the book Smart Chip from St. Petersburg and one of the strongest blitz players in the history of the game, Genrikh Chepukaitis, has also employed it regularly.
It even appears at the top level: Magnus Carlsen, Levon Aronian, Ian Nepomniachtchi, Peter Svidler, Rauf Mamedov, Vugar Gashimov, Richard Rapport and Ivan Šarić have all won at least one classical game with the Modern defence at least once in their careers, while Yasser Seirawan and Jonathan Speelman ( who also wrote a book on the opening ) were its proponents back in the 80s.
The drawbacks of the Modern Defence?
Of course, the sentence in the previous paragraph exposes an important truth about The Modern Defence – it is perfectly suitable to serve as a surprise weapon.
But if I were completely honest, I wouldn’t recommend going down the same path I went and decided to play it exclusively. There are two problems in particular:
- I have noticed that, once I approached 2200 ELO, it became an obvious target for the opponent’s preparation. Even Peter Svidler, in one of his Q&A videos for chess24. com recommended having something else as the main weapon and picking up the Modern Defence as a side/surprise weapon.
- Even though my aim was to avoid a lot of opening theory, it turned out the Modern has quite extensive theory itself, due to a variety of possible White set-ups. Sure, it is an idea-based opening where the knowledge of ideas and general concepts helps tremendously and makes it somewhat universal. But even so, there are certain lines where you simply need to remember what you are doing, or you might not even make it out of the opening.
With that being said, I still highly recommend you to try it out.
I guarantee you will get exciting and fighting positions. Even if you sometimes pay the price, the Modern Defence is bound to make your games much more fun.
As they say – you live by the sword, you die by the sword!
Course Overview
Course in numbers
After getting acquainted with the Modern Defence, it is time to talk about the actual course.
The Modern Defence Against Everything consists of 636 trainable variations, 41 alternative variations and 59 informational variations, 2 which are accompanied by more than 150 000 words of annotations and more than 20 hours of (optional) video instruction. The average length of the variation is 13.87 moves.
The price
The price is 29.99$ for the course without video and 189.98$ for the course with video. From 10th February to 20th February, the repertoire is on an introductory sale, with a 33% discount on the course without the video (19.99$) and 47% (99.98$) on the course with video. 3
Organization and structure:
The variations are divided into 16 thematic chapters (whose picturesque names were „borrowed“ from Tiger Hillarp Persson’s books), as follows:
Chapter 1 – Introduction – initial remarks and comments
Chapter 2 – Quickstarter Guide – a typical feature of all Chessable repertoires, presenting a set of variations most often encountered in practice, which are sufficient for the student to try the opening. The Modern Defence Against Everything’s Quickstarter Guide consists of 35 variations
Chapter 3 -The Austrian Attack: Main Line after 7 e5– a dangerous setup where White plays f4 and follows it up with e5
Chapter 4 – The Austrian Attack: Other Lines – setups where White plays f4 but delays the advance of the e-pawn
Chapter 5 – Flexible Dragon Unleashed: Nc3-Be3-Qd2 setups – setups featuring an early development of the dark-squared bishop (fighting against c5 break) where White goes for the quick queenside castling and tries to overrun Black on the kingside
Chapter 6 – Flexible Dragon Restrained: Nc3-Be3-Nf3 setups – setups featuring an early development of the dark-squared bishop where White plays in a more restrained, positional manner
Chapter 7 – Into Midar: Nc3-Bg5 setups – setups featuring an early development of the dark-squared bishop to a more aggressive post Bg5
Chapter 8 – The Fianchetto Variation: g3-Bg2 setups – the quiet, but no less venomous setups involving an early fianchetto of the light-squared bishop
Chapter 9 – The Classical Variation: Nc3-Nf3 setups – a setup where White adheres to the classical principle of developing the knights before the bishops. Also leads to more positional and strategic play.
Chapter 10 – The Hippopotamus – the well-known setup with bishops on g7 and b7 and knights on e7 and d7. I recommend using it only against the „classical“ move order (Nf3-Nc3) with a4 included.
Chapter 11 – Mad Dog: Nf3-Bc4 setups – setups where White tries to probe our f7 point and often goes for the Qe2-e5 ideas
Chapter 12 – The Lazy Variation: Nf3-Nd3-c3 setups – the most solid approach against the Modern defence, where White tries to keep his solid center intact and prevent Black from developing active counterplay.
Chapter 13 – Early Deviations by White – all possible alternatives available to White on moves 2 and 3, with particular emphasis on Closed Sicilian and Grand Prix setups.
Chapter 14 – The Averbakh Variation: setups with c4 – a chapter devoted to „queen’s pawn“ setups where c4 has been included, or where White omits the e4 advance in favour of d4 altogether.
Chapter 15 – Sample Games On Master Level (Grandmaster Games) – a collection of annotated games where strong players have played the Modern defence.
Chapter 16 – Sample Games On Patzer Level (Author’s Games) – a collection of annotated games where the author of these lines has played the Modern defence.
Challenges I encountered while working on The Modern Defence Against Everything repertoire
The creation of this Chessable repertoire has probably been the most difficult project of my entire life.
There are several reasons for this. First of all, I had no prior experience in writing a coherent chess repertoire. It was a big challenge to lay it out, organize the material and structure it, let alone start producing it.
Secondly, up to that point, I was only familiar with Chessable from the user perspective. I didn’t know how exactly the process of publishing a course works. I had to learn everything from scratch – from importing .pgns to writing annotations, doing graphical arrows and including links to other chapters and variations. There was a lot of going back and forth that cost me a lot of time and nerves and it definitely prolonged the release of this repertoire.
Last, but not least, the Modern Defence is not the easiest opening for an author to tackle.
As is apparent from the number of chapters and variations, The Modern Defence Against Everything is a big repertoire.
This is a direct consequence of the Modern Defence’s nature – since Black doesn’t contest White’s center, the opening play is not forced. Basically any developing setup by White is viable and transpositions between various setups are very common. It was quite challenging to take everything into account – even Tiger Hillarp Persson didn’t mention all the possibilities in his books (for example, the line 1 e4 g6 2 h4!?). I had to be vigilant not to exclude anything (although I still don’t rule out the possibility I did).
As a consequence, it took me much longer to do this repertoire than I expected (6 months of on-and-off work). Numerous hours were spent analyzing, importing, commenting, fixing mistakes, fixing the fixes of mistakes, replying to beta tester comments, improving the initial version, etc.
The pros of the course / What I am content with?
Despite the challenges, I am glad it managed to see the light of the day. I can say that I am quite happy and proud of the final result. Even though it is not very modest to praise my own horse, I am very content with several aspects of The Modern Defence Against Everything. Some of the pros of the course are, as follows:
- Thorough and deep annotations. I did my best to explain the ideas, plans and concepts – especially in the early opening stage of the game.
- A lot of links in the annotations, pointing out move orders and transpositions and making it easier for the student to compare similar, yet slightly different variations
- Number of alternative lines and alternatives offered to the students when facing critical lines
- A lot of independent analysis
- A couple of surprising and sacrificial novelties
- A solid number of annotated games, with relatively thorough annotations.
- A separate chapter with my own games, in accordance to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Skin In The Game principle.
- Honesty. I firmly believe in being authentic in life. I didn’t try to present the Modern Defence as the next best thing, but as a primarily practical weapon. Already in the introduction to the repertoire, I mentioned it is probably not advisable to follow my steps and turn it into your sole defense against 1 e4 and I tried to remain as objective as possible throughout the repertoire.
The cons of the course / What is something I am not content with?
However, I can’t pretend everything is perfect. Even though only three days have passed since the course was published 4, there are some aspects of the course I am not content with. In hindsight, I wish I did some things differently. Some of the cons of the course are, as follows:
- Uneven length of the lines. It is always a question when the author should stop analyzing a certain variation. I haven’t managed to cope with that task in the best possible way. Some of the lines are too long, some of them are perhaps a tad too short.
- Occasional overreliance on the engine. In some complicated lines, I fell victim to clicking through the engine analysis and switching off my brain. As I was going through the course myself, I noticed I didn’t consider some human options. Some of it was corrected in beta, but definitely not all of it.
- Overoptimism in certain lines. I did my best to remain objective and honest, but I feel there are some lines I may have evaluated too optimistically. Not too many, fortunately.
- Lack of smoothness when it comes to the official videos. I was never fully content with my presentation/brodcasting skills and 100% natural in front of the camera. I did get better over the years, and videos I filmed later for this repertoire are much better than the first few, but I still feel there is much left to be desired, especially compared to some more renowned authors such as Chessexplained or John Bartholomew.
Short & Sweet – The Modern Defence
Chessable also has a series of free repertoires – the so-called Short & Sweet series – which serve as introductory courses for a certain opening.
The Modern Defence also got its version, where I try to present the Modern Defence through 22 main, tactical, sacrificial and fun variations.
Think of it as a slightly more cheeky, shorter and attractive version of the Quickstarter Guide chapter.
Conclusion
There you have it! I hope this overview has provided you with a better idea about the Modern Defence and what you can expect from The Modern Defence Against Everything repertoire on Chessable.
Even though there are things that might have been improved 5, I think the repertoire is of a very decent quality. A huge number of hours have been spent to create this repertoire and I hope the student will be able to sense this effort as he goes through the variations!
To conclude, if this post enticed your curiosity or if you simply want to support the author of these lines, feel free to check The Modern Defence Against Everything out, or to tell your chess friends about it.
I would be incredibly grateful for it :).