The Black Lion defenses

I saw a book at th library on the Black Lion. I looked at it and thought it seemed as though this was a KIA for  Black. Am I missing something with this?

Anyone who has some ideas on how this opening plays out or if there is a solid line that refutes Black play, I would be interested to hear about it

It became topical after Anand lost a game against it in 2009 or 2010. I'd not put too much stock in it-just an even game to play from.

If a defence for black gives you "an even game to play from", then it's probably a great defence, in my view. 

There is a book written by two masters from Denmark under I think the Gambit book company but I only briefly looked at it. Who knows, I may give it  a try and see how it plays out.

For those who don't know the black lion defence, here is what it can look like(I play something like it all the time).

It has really no relation with a KIA or pirc, foundamentally it's an Hanham Philidor reached via 1...d6 (which is in fact the usual modern move order). One wonders why they called in "the lion" instead of "the hanham philidor"; marketing might be a reason, since the Philidor has a (totally undeserved) bad reputation among amateurs. To be fair they advocate an highly unusual handling of this age-old system, in their lines black often pawnstorms the enemy kingside and stays with the king in the centre for a long time, if not for the whole game. The book has a reputation for being inspirational and interesting, but sometimes not overly reliable (the authors are a bit too optimistic regarding black chances).

I don't know about any refutation but the only time you don't get to use the setup is when White wants an endgame.

Yes, one must be willing to play this queenless middlegame. However It's not much for white, the wandering king usually finds a safe spot on c7 (after c6) and might be called "pleasantly centralized" rather than "exposed". For sure white gets a certain lead in development in the meantime, so the position must be a tiny bit better for him, but it's not something that would scare me away from this variation.

Thanks for the insights on that. I used to play the Pirc and yes I see no resemblence to it. Perhaps I evaluated the look of the position a bit prematurely.

The Black Lion has 5 different lines of play.  The Queen trade only happens in one of them (named The Lion's Yawn in book by Jerry Van Rekom).  Here is a link to a Black Lion web site.

http://www.vanrekom.nl/thelion/indexgb.htm

Looks a lot like the old Indian

All I know is that it seems intriguing to play. NOt sure if it fits my style of play but what the heck.

Yeah it can be really fun to play. You can try with White but I'm not sure how cooperative Black has to be.

isnt this just a moden phillidor?

d6 nd7 e5?

At first yes, but a lot of the lines in the book have hard refutations. There was a review published somewhere that refuted several of the book's lines in a convincing way, I don't remember where though.

Great insights into the OP

Apparently the book is fairly terrible. Written by mediocre players, and with a zillion mistakes. A critic even found a diagram that was supposed to be "in black favour" that was actually something like 7 on Houdini.

From what I understood, it's a pet line for club players. Nothing wrong with that. Then the whole fuss is marketing, and pretty well handled since they manage to sell much more books than many GM writing insightful stuff about sound openings.

That is definitely good to know. I have seen many books that are like that, such as some of Andrew Soltis' works on openings such as the Englih with 2. g3 against nearly every imaginable Black reply.

The authors are not elite gms but still much stronger than anyone of us. Calling them "mediocre" is honestly a pretty funny thing to do.

It's not terrible at all, it's an interesting book. It does however contain several mistakes, so the reader should not accept all the lines blindly. (after all, if you are going to play an unusual and risky line by just parroting published analysis without doing your own work on it, you deserve to land in a dead lost position).

I thought it was written by a couple of 1900's?