King's Indian Defense
Black lets White build the 'ideal' pawn centre on purpose, fianchettoes the bishop, and then attacks that very centre from the flank — hypermodern strategy at its sharpest.
After 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 Black hands White a full classical centre without a fight, trusting that pieces (especially the g7 bishop and a knight rerouted to somewhere active) can attack it more effectively than pawns could have contested it directly. The resulting positions are wildly different depending on White's fifth move — from the razor-sharp, opposite-wing-race Mar del Plata middlegame to the slow manoeuvring of the Fianchetto Variation — but the same hypermodern idea underlies them all.
The ideas in 6 positions
Click a card to see it on the board. 0/6 viewed
Choose your path
White chooses the fourth move, which decides the whole character of the game: a classical centre, a solid clamp, an all-out race, or quiet manoeuvring.
Common mistakes, by level
Real patterns from club games. Every line is engine-checked; in the evals, plus is good for White.
Middlegame plans
What to do once the book runs out.
Now make it stick
Reading is the easy part. Solve the real mistakes from this opening until the patterns fire by themselves.
Sources: Lichess opening database and the chess-openings ECO table (names, structures) · Wikibooks: Chess Opening Theory (CC BY-SA) · Stockfish 19, depth 18-20, run on every mistake line and cross-checked with multi-PV search
Give up the centre on purpose
Move 1 of the line — press → or waitUnlike classical openings, Black does not contest d4 and e4 with pawns at all. The fianchettoed bishop already presses on the long diagonal, and the whole hypermodern idea is to attack this big White centre later with pieces and a well-timed pawn break, rather than prevent it from forming.