15 September 2009

Kings Indian Reversed/Attack

While thumbing through Wade & O'Connell's 'Bobby Fischer's Chess Games', I noticed that the Index of Openings had entries for both 'Kings Indian Reversed' and 'Kings Indian Attack'. Since I had always assumed these terms were synonymous, I looked at a few of the games, and, as I suspected, couldn't see any way of differentiating the two classifications.

For example, the last game in each of the two classifications arrived at the following position, although by different move orders.


1.e4 c6 2.d3 d5 3.Nd2 g6 4.g3 Bg7 5.Bg2 e5 6.Ngf3 Ne7 7.O-O O-O 8.Re1

Here are the games...

Robert James Fischer vs Vlastimil Hort, Siegen ol final 1970 [KIR]
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1044305

Robert James Fischer vs Robert Huebner, Palma de Mallorca iz 1970 [KIA]
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1044306

...As usual, one thing led to another, and I ended up taking a closer look at all 30 KIR/KIA games. It turned out that the bulk of the games were from 1956-57 and had Fischer playing 1.Nf3 as White. During the same period he also played 1.e4 as White, along with the Kings Indian in response to 1.d4 as Black. It seems he decided on his opening repertoire very early in his career.

NB: A web search showed that the preferred term (by a wide margin) is 'Kings Indian Attack'. Only seven games in Wade & O'Connell used the term KIA, the others used KIR. • The ECO codes assigned to the KIR/KIA games by my reference database were all over the map: 5 each of A04, A05, and A07; 7 of A08; 2 of B10 (the two games linked above), and 1 each of six other codes scattered across Bxx, Dxx, and Exx.

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