KIA According to Stella (5)

Every Réti player facing ...Nf6, ...g6 and ...d6 eventually has to decide whether to play d2-d4. It's the natural move, but it leads straight into King's Indian theory. After 6.d4 Nbd7 7.Nc3 e5 8.e4, the main reply 8...c6 alone counts around 16,000 games. GM Andrea Stella's answer is to stay out of it. White keeps the pawn on d3, lets Black play ...e5, and turns the game into a strategic fight on his own terms, far from the usual King's Indian battlegrounds.

There is a particular satisfaction in playing your opponent's own setup back at them, a tempo up. Part 4 pushes that idea into lines where White takes up structures that usually belong to the defender, with the extra move already in hand. Two examples run through the volume. One is the Pirc structure, where Black answers with ...g6, ...Bg7 and later ...e5. The other is the ...d5/...Nc6/...Bf5 treatment that Baadur Jobava has long recommended for Black — reached here after 1.Nf3 d5 2.g3 Nc6 3.d4 Bf5, a Jobava London with colors reversed. After 1.Nf3 d5 2.g3 g6 3.Bg2 Bg7 4.O-O e5 5.d3, Stella observes that the position is almost a Reversed Pirc. Black is objectively fine, but the extra move changes the practical picture, and the authors have found fresh ideas to pose problems exactly where theory promises Black an easy life.

GM Pier Luigi Basso has played the Slav with Black his entire career. He knows which White systems create genuine discomfort for a prepared Slav player—and which ones a Black player secretly welcomes. This course was shaped by that experience from the other side of the board. The lines presented here are the ones Basso never enjoyed facing: the most venomous, practical systems against the Slav. This is what distinguishes the repertoire—it's not theoretical completeness for its own sake, but a curated selection of the positions that make strong Slav players uncomfortable.

In the landscape of modern opening theory, the Fianchetto Reti has emerged as a flexible weapon that allows White to reach Grünfeld-type positions with an extra tempo. While Part 1 established the foundational understanding of this setup, Part 2—authored by GM Andrea Stella and GM Pier Luigi Basso with assistance from GM Alexey Dreev—tackles Black's most challenging response: the aggressive ...c5 combined with ...Nc6, creating rich tactical complexities from the opening moves.

There is a particular kind of practical wisdom in choosing an opening that sidesteps the opponent's preparation without surrendering any ambition. The Reti — 1.Nf3 followed by g3 and Bg2 — has been built on this philosophy. Where 1.d4 or 1.e4 invites encyclopedic theoretical battles, 1.Nf3 whispers a different invitation: let us play chess. And increasingly, that whisper has been heard at the highest level. Magnus Carlsen himself has recently turned to 6.a4 in the Reti — a subtle, offbeat move that quietly dislocates Black's standard plans and demands fresh thinking from the very first middlegame decisions.