here I come.

First post: Torre Attack

A Brief description of both side's plans

This opening was named after some guy called Torre, and it starts with 1.d4 2.Nf3 and 3.Bg5.

The Opening setup is basically quite similar to the standard Colle-Koltanowski Setup, with pawns on c3, d4, e3. However, in the Torre attack, Bg5 prevents the Bishop from getting hindered by the pawns.

Generally, White's plan is something like in the Colle-Zukertort (Rubinstein Attack), with plans of Ne5 and f4 coming after white has achieved the typical opening setup. Depending on the situation, White may choose to delay castling, but not for too long.

This is how the Whiteking might get attacked if it doesn't castle: Black may sometimes play Nxe5, and when white recaptures with the d-pawn, and the black knight goes from f6 to e4 (provided e4 is guarded), the two dark-squared bishops get traded. After Qxe7, if White still doesn't castle, watch out for the queen swooping down to h4 with Check. And rmb.....a knight on e4 and a queen on h4 spells disaster for white.

Now all this might be very confusing, but in a nutshell, you might want to castle before you play Ne5, although as i said before, you can delay it.

Black's plan is to play b6 and Bb7, and sometimes play 0-0-0. This is because, with this kind of formation, White can easily launch a kingside attack. I'm serious. In Radjabov-Naidistch in some random tournament, the latter got blown away by the Azerbaijan Prodigy (aka Radjabov) because of the awesome power of the Torre kingside attack.

When I played tis against Kien Wei from the NUS team, (rated abt 2200), he said he played it before in his childhood and understood the awesome power of it. He castled queenside and won, but he told me I could have built an attack earlier and at the very least achieved equality.

More details about this next post.

~Kai Yen~