I have been looking at some KID lines recently and I remembered how exciting this opening is. I played the KID with black until around 2000 (with pretty good results) and then from 2008 I switched sides and started playing against it with white.

The following game is from the Berane tournament I won back in 1998. It was a category 8 round-robin tournament with 14 participants and lasted for two weeks (there was even a free day in the middle of the tournament). The blasphemy of two games a day didn’t even occur to people back then. My score of 9.5/13 also brought me my first GM norm. I remember that my daily routine was get up around 11am, take a walk, eat lunch, prepare for the game, play the game, eat dinner and read Shakespeare’s Complete Works before sleep. In those two weeks during the tournament I read all the plays and almost all of the sonnets!

This game is also one of the most spectacular games I’ve ever played. The following diagram shows the star move of the game:

29…Nf7!!

My opponent was Julian Radulski, who would later on become a good friend, a GM, and achieve rating of over 2600. Julian tragically died in 2013 at the age of 41, but he is fondly remembered by anyone who knew him.

The opening phase of the game is not of much interest today, but the character of play that followed is very much in the best spirit of the KID. I start my comments from the moment the real chaos begins. Here’s the game and you can enjoy it together with the lines that remained unplayed: