hi everybody and welcome to another 10 minute chess opening video it's been a while since i've
made one of these but i'm going to be adding a few to the playlist that already exists
today we're going to be talking about the catalan opening which is a very solid very reliable weapon
that you can play with the white pieces against everything okay the players who will benefit from
this the most are those that are potentially more intermediate but beginners stick around because
this opening is truly fantastic so the first move of the catalan as far as i recommend it is the
queen's pawn and then this the setup that you go for is two of these pawns in the center the knight
out and then you develop your bishop to g2 and castle your king so what that looks like let's say
something like this non-confrontational approach from black black doesn't immediately try to get
our pawn black doesn't play the england gambit for example i'm just going to show you the setup
to begin with you can just go knight f3 first if you don't want to play it in queen's gambit style
fiance your bishop say something like this black does the copycat approach doesn't really matter
essentially what i'm trying to show you here is this is the approach that you're going for
you will be gambiting this pawn uh whether you want to do that on as early as the second move
with the queen's gambit or later with the delayed catalan the point is the same the point is that
if black takes a couple things happen this pawn is doubled but for the moment black is up a pawn
this capture opens up your bishop so in the future you'll often have this move knight to e5 which
will have the benefit of opening and pressuring on this diagonal and actually just rerouting
and taking this pawn now in a perfect world you win this pawn back and black traded their d-pawn
for your c-pawn so you have the two central pawns and again in a perfect world you will finish your
development and get two central pawns with more space in the center of the board if black hangs
onto this pawn with moves like b5 which at the moment is impossible but i'll show you when it is
then you can use certain undermining moves like b3 and a4 excuse me and a4 on the queen side to
chip away at the defense so let's say that black doesn't take okay let's say that we just get a
a regular standard position maybe something like this more defensive when we finish our development
uh let's say black just play something like bishop here you're going to have a lot of
different versions the black setup is not the most important thing in the world what you are
going for in these positions is a combination of a few plans depending on how your opponent plays so
queen b3 is always useful when b7 is a weakness when is b7 a weakness when black has moved this
bishop out you're also looking to play e4 if it's possible so let me just give you a funny example
let's say you know this bishop is not covering the center you can play moves like queen c2 which
then try to expand in the center of the board with e4 taking more space and ultimately helping your
development because when you move this bishop out what's going to happen is you're going to
put both rooks in the center of the board so that's just a couple of plans i mean there's
there's also this knight hop into the center that we know about that usually happens more like this
and also you can quite simply start a pawn storm on the queen side you're not really going for the
king you're not going to have some crazy knockout punch oh you know attack on the king early on
like i said it's a more slow developing process you'll notice that this bishop hasn't moved
sometimes you put the bishop out to b2 which is very solid you can also make
this trade if you like and then replace the dark squares right so something like this just
some people like to make this trade because you can then put all of your pawns on dark squares
so you've traded off your dark square bishop that bishop is no longer part of the game and then you
you go for you know plan number two or plan number one depending where it is on your list queen side
expansion something like b4 and so on really trying to maximize this light squared bishop
most commonly i'll say this i'll say that when you play d4 what you're gonna face the
most is just something like d5 uh or the king's indian defense right so you will face a lot of
knight f6 and so on and so forth um and so when you play like this you can offer the queen's
gambit right away which is what is already what i said and here you don't even have to set up
your catalan if they take it you can just take the entire center that's really the point of the
queen's gambit so you choose how you do it whether you want to play it early or not uh and what black
is going to usually do is black is just going to you know play something like this a lot of people
learn the queen's gambit declined and i will make a video on the queen's gambit system soon
you'll play bishop g2 you know i'll play bishop d6 castles castles now you'll go for your c4 idea
so in in a position like this like if black were to take again you know about this knight e5 idea
but here it doesn't quite work because you know you don't necessarily want to make this
trade there's a couple of other ways to win this pawn back first of all you can win it back with
this knight second of all you can play queen c2 because again remember the other idea is
to take the center so you have this this kind of fusion of ideas that you can mess around with and
and try to find where you implement at what right moment take over the full center or win this pawn
back right away i'll show you you know just for clarification like for example in this position
knight e5 is actually quite different because the knight just simply cannot be captured so
that is a reasonable move knight d2 to take is also a reasonable move and what i showed you is
if something like this occurs remember that you always have possibilities here but you also can
just undermine that pawn and if it takes then black has a rectangle of doubled isolated pawns so
for a moment you're down two but obviously you will be winning both of them back then you will
take the center play knight e5 and slowly expand in a positional manner that's really when when
this when this capture occurs uh if it doesn't if black just plays really solidly you know your
plans here as well i recommend you don't take you always allow this to happen so just keep on
developing you do have that trade that i talked about earlier where you can replace in the center
just to get this bishop out of the way or just b3 bishop b2 slow expansion and look for a central e4
push if you watch this video one or two times and then try to implement these sort of game plans uh
you will you'll start gaining experience and and these positions will come more naturally
now the king's indian is something you're also going to face a lot obviously this is not a
this isn't there's no gambit of this pawn so uh what what what those positions will look like
uh and actually i i'm not a huge fan of playing the catalan against the king's indian i think
there are uh ways to pressure king's indian players early on if you haven't seen the ideas
check out my london video i look at a couple different ways there
but here you know the position will look a little bit different uh since you don't have this capture
what you're going to try to do once again is maybe take a lot of space on the queen side so
advancing with these pawns taking space attacking on that side of the board
or as i already said looking for this trade bishop or or let me just show you one more thing let me
just play a random move bishop here look for the trade of the dark squared king's indian bishop
that's another very common idea against the king's indian player and remember that king's
indian players are looking to play e5 or c5 and both of these moves have merit so if you actually
attack a king's indian player early with a move like d5 which would attack this knight obviously
if there's no knight consider not attacking it but if uh if obviously if the knight is there
then you can target it and and prevent black from getting the setup that they're comfortable with
so you will face d5 and king's indian the most and i guess before we end off what to do against any
sort of england gambit just take it you don't need to go for the catalan and what i always
recommend is you don't even have to enter the main line here just just develop your other knight
and if they take back just just play e4 just be simple knight c3 e4 bishop out and short castle
that's the best and simplest way to deal with the england gambit if they play it very aggressively
you take with the queen develop both bishops one of these two squares and then just castle
in either direction england gamut is not something that you have to worry about and if they play c5
the best thing to do is just to push the pawn in the center defend it with c4 and then go for your
full center setup all the same that's as quick of a repertoire in the catalan as i can give you
if there's any sort of questions that you might come up with after one or two views
let me know in the comments below another thing that i should plug before i end the video is
that we have an amazing discord community also in the description almost 4 000 people talking about
chess music whatever it is that they're interested in finding friends online in these trying times
and if you want to find a way to support me and find some cool opening resources for yourself
there are openings courses on e4 d4 e6 b6 and the caracon systems for black two videos
are going to appear on that side i got my size mixed up and i will see you in the next video