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KID Manual - Understand the Botvinnik Structure

GM Petar Arnaudov

Introduction

Dear chess friends,
In this article, we continue to deal with the typical King's Indian structures. As in the first article on this subject, I am going to show all the typical positional and tactical motifs in the structure.

On the diagram, you could see the structure that will be examined in the article. It arises when White meets the move f7-f5 by means of exf5. The exchange exf5 is good when Black can't respond with Nxf5. If Black takes on f5 with the bishop, then after g2-g4, White obtains a full control over the e4-square. If gxf5, the most popular response then is f2-f4 fixing the pawn on f5 and provoking e5-e4. In this position, the rule is that if Black has a pawn on c5, he has an acceptable position because he controls the important d4 - square; if Black's pawn is on c7, then White is better because could use the d4-square. In the game, Flor - Petrosian we will see one of the rare examples when Bxf5 is a good move. This is usually when the dark-squared bishops are missing. In Botvinnik - Boleslavsky, the Patriarch of the Soviet chess school shows us how to handle this position with White. In Petrosian - Stein and Bronstein - Petrosian, we can see Black's defensive ideas. In Kuzmin - Taimanov, we can see why exf5 does not give any advantage when Black has a Knight on e7 and can answer it with Nxf5. The last example is a recent game of mine against the silver medalist from the European Championship 2016. I managed to outplay my high rated opponent and eventually lost a completely winning position in a time trouble.