The Catalan, similar to the English opening, is very much about being conservative in the choice of pawn structure, i.e., not committing too early in the opening to a given pawn formation and keeping some options open so that ultimately, the optimal structure can be opted for purely reactively, given what black has decided to go for themselves. That difference lies largely in the type of pawn structures that emerge from the Catalan. Often times names are assigned for a good reason, in the case of the Catalan, the fact that this queen's pawn opening, with g3, has a name for itself, is because the subsequent positions are very different than most sidelines of the queen's pawn with or without g3. I admit, I personally love the opening myself. Terminology discussions aside, let's now delve a bit deeper into the role of c4 in the Catalan and Open Catalan. If you wanted, you could call it a delayed queen's gambit accepted with g3, but in fact it more commonly goes by the name of Open Catalan. In the case white leaves the matter unresolved, and allows black to take on c4 (for instance in your examples), then sure white has decided to play in the style of queen's gambit, with g3. This observation is also consistent with your examples. ![]() c4 black is the side with the tempo to decide whether or not to take on c4, thus, white is clearly sacrificing a pawn. Whereas, to clarify the contrast, in the Queen's gambit, 1. In short, no, a priori the Catalan opening is not a gambit, because unlike the Queen's gambit, in Catalan d5 is played after white's c4, which means white is first to decide whether to take on d5 immediately or let black take on c4. ![]() Qc7 f6ĭoes White play a gambit in the open Catalan or is the c4 pawn doomed to be taken back necessarily, at some point in the game? ![]() I have purposely chosen to display games by Kramnik as he is a major player of the Catalan games and I assume his continuations in these positions are theoretically correct (hence it all boils down to what Black chooses). ġ.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 d5 4.g3 dxc4 5.Bg2 Bb4+ 6.Bd2 a5 7.Qc2 Bxd2+ 8.Qxd2 c6 9.a4 b5 10.axb5 cxb5 11.Qg5 O-O 12.Qxb5 Ba6Īnother example is this other below game where again Black gives back the pawn after quite a few moves although it seems it could have defended and kept it, had it wanted to, preparing. One notorious example is the below game where Black eventually gives back the material playing 9.b5 without (apparent) preparation however, I do not see why this is necessary and the questions is whether the underlying idea for White behind this opening is to just gambit without really looking at any way of taking back the c4 pawn unless re-offered. I have been looking at the open variation of the Catalan game, where White seems not to extremely worry about conceding the pawn with 4.dxc4, going for calm development instead.
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