
Some openings are very irritating to face. Imagine you are playing a tournament and want a win in your next game with the black pieces. You intend to play the Marshall Attack or the Breyer Variation of the Spanish, with some fighting middlegame, but your opponent spoils the fun by playing the boring Exchange Variation of the Ruy Lopez where the queens disappear very early and you are forced to endure a long endgame in which your counterpart keeps pressing in an almost equal position. Irritating, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be just better if you could keep the queens on the board somehow? Robert Ris in his 60 minute ChessBase DVD: Fighting the Ruy Lopez Exchange Variation with 5...Qe7, proposes a nice line for those adventurous souls who hate to enter into an ending straight out of the opening.
The starting position of the DVD after the surprising 5...Qe7. Black wants to get a position
with kings castled on opposite sides, after which the fun begins!
Black’s idea is simple and easy to implement: the rook on the d-file
can pose some problems for White in certain lines.
Believe it or not, this final position from the game Almagro Llamas-Svetushkin, 2012,
has been reached from Exchange Ruy Lopez! Not excited yet? Read more!
This is a model game in this line: Sergey Kasparov-Ris, where Black gained the upper hand after the next move 27...Re6! Did someone say the Ruy Lopez Exchange variation leads to dull positions? Not anymore!
The Dutch IM points out that the move Qe7 is just really underestimated and from a practical point of view it is an excellent weapon for black players.
Robert divides the material into three parts: part one deals with lines where White avoids or delays d4,
and part two and three deal with variations with an early d4.
Ris is very energetic and wastes no time in this one-hour video. He feels that perhaps White can count on an edge in certain lines with precise play, but he has not found it yet and so he keeps playing this line time and again.
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