I like to play the French as black.
However, in the advanced variation if I castle kings side I often seem to end up in the common pressure situation of a co ordinated attack where I have no knight on f6 because of the "advanced" pawn which I struggle to get rid of.
Is it better not to castle in this variation?
In my opinion no-one played the French Defence better than Wolfgang Uhlmann. Here is a game where he played the interesting maneuver of Ng8-e7-f5 and then castled kingside. Having said that, he had to fight off a strong attack by White which would have probably overwhelmed most other players:
After 3:e5, I've gone with 3:... c5 for years (although I've had a tempo advantage Nf6 first if I can get away with it), for me it's more of a question to the problem child [edit] (White Bish). I've deflected many attacks with Qb6 to enable development options. Illustrated game is a good base line for Frogs Legs...
@vendasaid I like to play the French as black.
However, in the advanced variation if I castle kings side I often seem to end up in the common pressure situation of a co ordinated attack where I have no knight on f6 because of the "advanced" pawn which I struggle to get rid of.
Is it better not to castle in this variation?
There's a chess video on YouTube on the St. Louis Chess and Scholastic Society's channel, in it Yasser Seirawan talks about 4 openings which members of the audience asked about. I can't offhand remember if the French Defence was one of them, but what he said, which I think is good advice, is to find a player who plays this particular line and use them as a guide. So, if we take @mynameisklint's word for it that Wolfgang Uhlmann is a good guide then play through his games and see how to do it - I went through the above game and at first glance it seems like he knows what he's doing, the exchange sacrifice at the end is a particularly nice finish. The strongest player I can think of for the French defence is Korchnoi so look at his games as well, the guy has a variation named after him although it's an attack for white. There's 14 games on my database where he plays black against the advance variation, so there's another option for you.
The video's quite funny because Seirawan parodies Nimzowitsch towards the end.
@deepthoughtsaid There's a chess video on YouTube on the St. Louis Chess and Scholastic Society's channel, in it Yasser Seirawan talks about 4 openings which members of the audience asked about. I can't offhand remember if the French Defence was one of them, but what he said, which I think is good advice, is to find a player who plays this particular line and use them as a guide. So, if ...[text shortened]... er option for you.
The video's quite funny because Seirawan parodies Nimzowitsch towards the end.
Uhlmann's "Winning with the french" is an annotated collection of 60 of his games. It's a black repetoire book rather than a complete French book and it is excellent.
Yes I've looked on the St Loius website before.
Troble is remembering what I've watched.
Not the individual lessons but the content!!
Thanks to you all anyway
Yeah those are them, but don't have Uhlmann's annotations unless they are somewhere down in the comments section. He does a good job of providing insight although he doesn't painstakingly provide every sideline like many opening book authors do (which often just overwhelms me anyway).
@vendasaid Yes I've looked on the St Loius website before.
Troble is remembering what I've watched.
Not the individual lessons but the content!!
Thanks to you all anyway
On YouTube the easiest way to keep track of what you've watched is to give them a like (or dislike) after watching the video, that way you can tell if you've watched it.
@deepthoughtsaid On YouTube the easiest way to keep track of what you've watched is to give them a like (or dislike) after watching the video, that way you can tell if you've watched it.
I didn't mean that.
What I am saying is if I've watched the video on how to mate with 2 bishops for example, if it comes up in my game I can't remeber what to do.
French trouble
04 Jun '20 11:481 edit
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