White most often fianchettoes the king's bishop with g3 and Bg2. Siegbert Tarrasch rejected the opening as unsound in his 1931 work The Game of Chess, arguing that White should reply with the Staunton Gambit, with White being better after 2.e4 fxe4 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.Bg5 c6 5.f3 ! exf3. Its most notable use may have been in 1951, when both world champion Mikhail Botvinnik and his challenger, David Bronstein, played it in their 1951 World Championship match.Įlias Stein (1748–1812), an Alsatian who settled in The Hague, recommended the defence as the best reply to 1.d4 in his 1789 book Nouvel essai sur le Jeu des échecs, avec des réflexions militaires relatives à ce jeu.

The Dutch has never been a main line against 1.d4 and is rarely seen today in high-level competition, although a number of top players, including Alexander Alekhine, Bent Larsen, Paul Morphy, Miguel Najdorf, and Hikaru Nakamura have used it with success. Historically, White has tried many methods to exploit the kingside weaknesses, such as the Staunton Gambit (2.e4) and Korchnoi Attack (2.h3 and 3.g4). Like its 1.e4 counterpart, the Sicilian Defence, the Dutch is an aggressive and unbalancing opening, resulting in the lowest percentage of draws among the most common replies to 1.d4. The Dutch Defence is a chess opening characterised by the moves:īlack's 1.f5 stakes a claim to the e4-square and envisions an attack in the middlegame on White's kingside however, it also weakens Black's kingside to an extent (especially the e8–h5 diagonal). Elias Stein, Nouvel essai sur le jeu des échecs, avec des réflexions militaires relatives à ce jeu, 1789

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