KIA (stats favour Black)

I know a few of you are more than interested in this opening.

Andrew Martin does a good job here.

YouTube

A good clean easy to understand well explained game.

An interesting comment is that lower graded Black players often
beat their higher graded opponents with this opening which you
get the feeling he does not rate very much.

If you are totally at ease with the strategy it entails as White then OK.
But using it as a theory dodger can backfire.

Andrew's vid is a slighly masked advert for SCORE.
(I think this is for: Selected Chess Openings Repertoire Explained.)
But given all the free excellent vids Andrew has dropped on the net of late
then this is totally acceptable.

I predict Paul is not going to like this thread.. haha.

Originally posted by nimzo5
I predict Paul is not going to like this thread.. haha.

I'm OK with this. The more people underrate it, the better it is for me. It plays to my advantage sometimes!

I don't know what this means, but my experience cuts both ways, in that I have scored extremely well against higher rated competition OTB (I once beat two 2150 experts in a row with the KIA in an open section, only to be paired up the next day and crushed like a bug), but not as well as I would like sometimes against lower rated players.

The KIA isn't really an opening per se, so much as it is a collection of lines against various openings and formations. A player who is dogmatic about the KIA will be less successful, in that it is often more productive to take the game in a different direction depending on how black responds.

Even then, KIA players don't really learn or memorize lines most of the time. They tend to learn formations and plans and typical tactics, and adapt according to what black wants to show them.

I could go on and on, but I'll stop!

Hi Paul.

As Martin hints, 'Club Players' are guilty of playing 2.d3
finachetting the kingside and seeing what happens.

Like any opening you have to at least have a smattering of what to do.
Some do use it as a theory dodger, good Sicilian players will be wary of it
and have a line v it. trouble is White's set-up is a bit stiff so will have to,
to a degree, go along with it.

There is no reason why you should not score with it if you have put
the time in. You will only get out of an opening what you have put into it.

Originally posted by greenpawn34
Hi Paul.

As Martin hints, 'Club Players' are guilty of playing 2.d3
finachetting the kingside and seeing what happens.

Like any opening you have to at least have a smattering of what to do.
Some do use it as a theory dodger, good Sicilian players will be wary of it
and have a line v it. trouble is White's set-up is a bit stiff so will have to, ...[text shortened]... if you have put
the time in. You will only get out of an opening what you have put into it.

Some good points!

Against the Sicilian, it works well when black plays an early ...e6, but against formations with ...d6 white has to aim for the middlegame and hope black is inaccurate.

In the context of Sicilians in general, the KIA can be classified as a form or variant of the Closed Sicilian, with the distinction being that in the KIA white's knights are usually placed on f3 and d2, while in the mainstream Closed Sicilian the queen's knight goes to c3, and the king's knight can go to f3, e2, or even h3. The pawn structures are consistent, and the variations in the knight placement determine the nomenclature.

But I ramble on!