Beating the Hedgehog System

Do you struggle to score against the Hedgehog and find it difficult to break the Black fortress? This opening manual, which could double as a positional middlegame manual, will show you how White can use a space advantage in this chess opening with maximum results.

The Hedgehog System, a personal favourite of many club players, is important to understand for all White players as the positions are near-universal. They can arise from the English Opening, the Nimzo-Indian and Queen’s Indian Defences and the Sicilian Opening. The Hedgehog is a flexible defence as Black can undermine your centre with …b6-b5 or …d6-d5. Black can attack your kingside dark squares with a queen-and-bishop battery or go after your king by launching the g-pawn.

That’s why Beating The Hedgehog System focuses on the most airtight variations, taking the sting out of Black’s counterplay and making White’s space advantage count. You will learn the general strategies but also essential features such as:

– how to get the ideal queenside formation versus the Hedgehog

– how to use x-rays and little tactics to stop Black’s …d6-d5 break

– how to provoke Black’s e-pawn to move to e5

– when to push your a-pawn to the fourth rank… and when to hold it back

Included are fifteen model games and thirty strategy and tactics exercises to fine-tune your feel for this Opening. This book has been adapted from the MoveTrainer® and video Chessable course with the same name.

Hanna Ivan-Gal is a top-100 player in Hungary, Woman FIDE Master and an experienced coach. She is also the presenter of the Hedgehog video course on Chessable.

Laszlo Hazai from Hungary is an International Master, a lifetime FIDE Senior Trainer, a former coach of the Polgar sisters, and a distinguished opening theoretician who wrote dozens of Opening Surveys for New In Chess Yearbook.