Magnus Carlsen vs Hou Yifan, Bishop’s Opening, C24
2018 Grenke Chess Classic, Round 2, Karlsruhe, Germany, 04/01/18
Magnus Carlsen faced the highest rated female chess player, Hou Yifan, in the 2nd round of the Grenke Chess Classic. Once again he chose an unorthodox opening! After his King’s Indian against Caruana yesterday – watch the game here: https://youtu.be/ruTyGZ_lp_g
In today’s game he chose the Bishop’s Opening. An extremely rarely played line on grandmaster level. The Bishop’s Opening is based around attacking f7, the Achilles heel in black’s position. As opposed to the Giuoco Piano or the Ruy Lopez, this variation strikes at f7 immediately, and stops d5 by black as well. Two main exponents of the opening are Akiba Rubinstein, and John Nunn (with only a ten or so games each, but still).
The position arises after:
1.e4 e5
2.Bc4
The most common defense for black is the Berlin Defense (not the one which comes from the Ruy Lopez and leads to a queen exchange and a quick endgame) in which black responds with 2…Nf6. The point of this move is to immediately force white to defend e4, similarly to what happens in Petrov’s Defense (1.e4 e5, 2.Nf3 Nf6), but unlike in the Petrov, here white cant just recapture black’s e pawn if his is taken. So white defends. The most common move, and what Magnus played is 3.d3, simply supporting e4.
From this position the game could transpose into many Italian lines or Petrov’s Defense lines, and it usually does. The game between Carlsen and Hou Yifan resembled a Breyer Ruy Lopez after 15 moves.
In the game Magnus pressed on right out of the opening and created interesting imbalances in the position which provided a lot of attacking chances for him. He then managed to blast open the kingside (by first offering Hou to capture his f3 knight and double his pawns, which opened the g file). A couple of kingside pawns got exchanged and Magnus got a ready-made attack. And since he is an attacking genius it took him only 10-20 moves to run Hou Yifan over and get an easily convertible endgame.
Magnus is now at 1.5/2 and his future challenger, Fabiano Caruana is at 1/2, after having drawn both rounds. Not that the result here is as important as the World Championship Match, but it will surely influence their state of mind coming into the match.
2018 Grenke Chess Classic, Standings after Round 2:
Nikita Vitiugov 2/2
Levon Aronian 1.5/2
Maxime Vachier-Lagrave 1.5/2
Magnus Carlsen 1.5/2
Fabiano Caruana 1/2
Arkadij Naiditsch 0.5/2
Viswanathan Anand 0.5/2
Georg Meier 0.5/2
Matthias Bluebaum 0.5/2
Yifan Hou 0.5/2