page_title: Modern Benoni
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Modern Benoni / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Vugar Gashimov, chess grandmaster
context_page_description: The Modern Benoni is a chess opening that begins with the moves 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 c5 3.d5 e6. It is classified under the ECO codes A60–A79. After the initial moves, Black proceeds to capture on d5, creating a majority of black pawns on the queenside. To support their advance, the king's bishop is usually fianchettoed on g7. These two features differentiate Black's setup from the other Benoni defences and the King's Indian Defence, although transpositions between these openings are common.
  Frank Marshall invented the Modern Benoni in 1927, but his experiments with the opening went largely ignored for over 20 years. In the 1950s the system was revitalized by players in the Soviet Union, chief among them Mikhail Tal. Its subsequent adoption by players of a similarly aggressive and uncompromising style such as Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov established the opening's reputation as one of Black's most dynamic responses to 1.d4.
  The Modern Benoni suffered a serious theoretical crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, when players as Black encountered great difficulties in meeting the Taimanov Attack and the Modern Main Line.
context_section_description: The Modern Benoni was invented by Frank Marshall at the New York 1927 chess tournament. He played it twice, gaining a draw against José Raúl Capablanca in the Fianchetto Variation, but losing soundly to Aron Nimzowitsch, who played the Knight's Tour. Nimzowitsch received the third special prize of the tournament for this game and labelled Marshall's opening an "unfortunate" "extravagance" in his annotations; as a result, it lay virtually abandoned for decades. However, Karel Hromádka's experiments with the Benoni Defence in the 1930s occasionally featured the moves ...e7-e6 and ...exd5, resulting in a transposition to the Modern Benoni.
  Only in the 1950s was interest in the system revived, when the King's Indian Defence gained in popularity among Soviet players and their investigations branched into related opening systems such as the Modern Benoni. The imbalance inherent in its pawn structure and the counter-chances this implied for Black appealed to aggressive players such as Rashid Nezhmetdinov and Alexander Tolush; the Israeli master Moshe Czerniak also employed it frequently. Lev Polugaevsky, Boris Spassky and Alexey Suetin were among the younger generation of Soviet players who used it regularly in the 1950s and 1960s.
  But the player primarily responsible for elevating the Modern Benoni to the status of a major opening was Mikhail Tal, who took up the opening in 1953 after seeing one of Nezhmetdinov's games. The tactical positions it led to were a perfect fit for Tal's combinatorial gifts and he crushed many opponents in brilliant style. Famous examples include his game against Bukhuti Gurgenidze at the 1957 USSR championship, excerpted below, and his win against Yuri Averbakh at the same tournament the following year.
  He also became the first player to use the Modern Benoni in a world championship match, playing it twice against Mikhail Botvinnik in 1960. Former World Champion and opening authority Max Euwe acknowledged Tal's contribution to the opening by naming it the "Tal-System" in his 1965 opening encyclopedia.
  These developments did not go unnoticed outside the Soviet Union: the name "Modern Benoni" had appeared in print by 1955. In the 1960s Larry Evans began employing the system frequently, and from 1966 onwards, Bobby Fischer also included it in his repertoire, albeit as a secondary weapon. Even so, Fischer was responsible for one of the most famous games ever played with the opening: down 2–0 in the 1972 World Championship match, he answered Spassky's 1.d4 with the Modern Benoni in Game 3 and scored a momentum-changing victory.
  The successes of Tal and Fischer inspired a new generation of players to take up the Modern Benoni in the 1970s and 1980s, including Walter Browne, Ljubomir Ljubojević, John Nunn, Dragoljub Velimirović, Lev Psakhis, Mihai Suba and Nick de Firmian. The young Garry Kasparov also had the defence in his arsenal—his win against Viktor Korchnoi at the 1982 Lucerne Olympiad
  was considered the highlight of the tournament and remains one of the most famous games ever played in the opening. It became a favoured weapon for players needing to win against 1.d4: for example, Psakhis used it to defeat Yuri Razuvaev in the penultimate round of the 1980 USSR Championship,
  catching Alexander Beliavsky in the lead and ultimately sharing first place with him.
  But in the early 1980s, White scored several crushing victories at high-profile tournaments using the aggressive Taimanov Attack, which caused players to question the fundamental soundness of Black's opening. By the end of the decade, the Modern Main Line had also emerged as a dangerous weapon for White, which only compounded Black's troubles. As a result, the opening declined in popularity and a number of grandmasters gave it up altogether. Those who continued to play it often chose to do so via the move order 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 c5 4.d5, when White's early development of the knight to f3 rules out the Taimanov Attack and gives Black opportunities to avoid the Modern Main Line.
  Mired in this theoretical crisis, the Modern Benoni remained unp
caption: Vugar Gashimov, a leading practitioner of the Modern Benoni
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