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The Queen's Gambit & Catalan for Black Lasha Janjgava
Publisher: Gambit Publications

White can then aim for an early Qb3 to apply pressure on the Queenside in general and the b7 pawn in particular (although even here White needs to know something about the Queen's Gambit Accepted as Black can transpose to it with 4dxc4 ). Black then continues 15Bg4 and after 16.Qd3 he has 16Rae8 17.Nd2 and now 17f5 or 17Re6, to name just a few of the more characteristic ideas. This is slightly counter-intuitive to me, but perhaps I have been conditioned too much by old-fashioned opening manuals who treated the Queen's Gambit and the Catalan as entirely different complexes. The Georgian GM Lasha Janjgava has produced a fantastic text on the QGD and Catalan for black. The Colle is mainly effective against 1 d4 Nf6 2 Nf3 e6 and 1 d4 It can be as effective as the famous Catalan Bishop, only nudged along to the dark squares. I opened the game with the Fianchetto Variation of the Queen's Gambit Declined and black quickly gave me the opportunity to give him an isolated pawn, which I was happy to take. G3 … White goes for a Catalan-style development. The minimum openings I'd recommend for black would be stuff like the Benko Gambit, Scandinavian Defenses (although I think the Scandinavian is a really lame opening) and so forth, while with white you can still get away with the c3 Sicilian, and 3.Nc3, 3. Gjon has played this before against me and I think that some other It looks a little loose for Black, but computer analysis gives only a small edge to White after 8. In order to prevent this easy attacking plan, the ingenious 15.Re4 has been tried. It's an interesting line of the Marshall Defense to the Queen's Gambit (one of my favorite dubious openings): Gjon Feinstein — Dana Mackenzie. In it, experienced tournament players and experts in each specific opening will teach you what you absolutely have to know about the Slav, the Catalan, the Classical Queen's Gambit, the Chigorin Defence, etc.