Lessons completed: Magnus Carlsen's Stonewall

As part of my ongoing re-examination of the Dutch Stonewall defense, I recently completed the Chess.com lesson series "Magnus Carlsen's Stonewall" at https://www.chess.com/lessons/the-stonewall

Lesson 1 is a brief narrative intro to Carlsen's background in, and views of, the Stonewall, which as he points out is reachable from multiple openings; his stated preferred sequence is in fact a Nimzo-Indian start, if White allows it. He mentions the fact that his coach Norwegian GM Simen Agdestein was an expert in the Stonewall, which you can see in Win with the Stonewall Dutch.

Lesson 2 ("Anand-Carlsen: My First Stonewall") covers Carlsen's first major tournament-level use of it in 2015 against GM Vishwanathan Anand, the context being Carlsen having major issues with his 1. d4 defenses against Anand in the prior year. The game itself is rather famous and Black's early, somewhat daring sortie with the a-pawn is an excellent illustration of how it can be used in the structure, although Carlsen admits that White may be a little better in theory.

Lesson 3 ("Caruana-Carlsen: A Strong and Creative Idea for White") has Carlsen again playing aggressively on the a-file with an early ...a5 followed by ...Na6. Caruana looks to redeploy a knight to take advantage of the resulting b-pawn weakness, which resulted in a long think by Carlsen and the "concrete solution" of exchanging bishop for knight on e5, which however was double-edged positionally, so Carlsen again went all in for counterplay with the a-pawn. This wasn't entirely sound, but Carlsen manages to grind out a win in the endgame, taking advantage of White's bad light-square bishop.

Lesson 4 ("Wojtaszek-Carlsen: White Plays Nh3") has Carlsen go over some of the piece placement ideas for both White and Black, which is always useful. He admits his early ...a5 thrust in this game was "a bit too much", but describes how he was still able to find ideas for useful counterplay, including thinking in a non-standard way, with (as he says) no better opening than the Stonewall for doing that.

Lesson 5 ("Giri-Carlsen: Is The Stonewall Playable Without the Dark-Squared Bishop?") finishes off the high-level Stonewall lesson series. Carlsen uses yet another different initial move sequence (1...e6 and 2...Bb4) to reach a Stonewall formation, although as he mentions it was not at all forced. In fact, the bishops are exchanged early on d2, but Carlsen nonetheless eventually heads for the Stonewall structure without the dark-squared bishop, which conventional wisdom says is necessary to help cover Black's holes. While he effectively loses a tempo by entering the Stonewall with ...d6-d5, there are positional compensations from the misplacement of White's pieces in the structure, and it is interesting to see how these trade-offs play out in the game.

Although the videos aren't particularly high-quality in terms of production value, just being a camera on Carlsen rather casually demonstrating the games on a wood board while the video board follows along, it was fascinating to have insights into his high-level thinking and personal perspectives (see also "How Carlsen makes us feel better about chess"). For me it is particularly striking how some top-level practitioners readily state or imply their uncertainty about ideas and positions, being willing to accept different trade-offs and level of risk based on what type of position they want to play at the time - such as aiming for more chaotic positions without clear guidelines (see lesson 2). Carlsen was also straightforward about White standing a little better in games 2-3, which is why his play there has not been repeated in opening theory. His ending comment, that the Stonewall is a rich strategic weapon where the best player usually wins - "and we all like to think we're the best player at the table" - is a great way to sum things up.

I'll note one small but irritating issue with the video portion of the lessons, which includes Carlsen's narration, is that the board is part of the display and always shown with White at the bottom. If you're a Stonewall player yourself, naturally you would prefer to see that reversed.