Torre Attack
The Torre attack is an interesting opening system that White can use to attack in the kingside mainly. You have many ways to play, and it turns out to be a really complex system.
You can compare the nature of this opening with the London system which is similar with a big difference. In reality is a good weapon that many people use in amateur chess, the Torre attack is famous for its simplicity.
If black is not well-prepared to face this Torre attack they could be in problems very soon. It involves pretty active play in the opening, and as we will see you must know what you are doing in this opening.
Because, there are some lines that black can use to counter the Torre attack that you should be prepared for too. It’s one of this openings that starts with a positional battle to see who gets the best development.
But it quickly turns into something really aggressive once both sides have finished their development. If you want to learn how to use the Torre attack to increase your rating keep reading.
The mainlines of the Torre attack
First, the Torre attack starts with the following moves:
Very similar to other queen’s gambit systems. It’s very flexible, you can transpose to almost any of the main queen’s gambit lines.
But when white plays the Torre attack is trying to get a certain system that we will see. Of course, the big difference from other systems more solid-like, is that you develop your black-squared bishop fast, this is the most important factor. We will go deeper on this later.
If you want to remain loyal to the Torre system the game could follow like this:
And this is the key position.
You can play this against pretty much any idea black comes up with, for example, black could play like this:
And you are playing the same against the king’s Indian defense. The important part is that you stick with the configuration of pawns (c3, d4, e3) and you develop quickly.
We could say is one of those universal opening you can use against anything. The effectivity will completely depend on you and how much you dominate the system.
Plans and ideas of the Torre attack
The main idea of the Torre attack in difference from the other systems similar to this is the c1 bishop. Normally in this kind of system you leave the bishop on c1 and play with the pawn structure that we have seen.
In this opening you get it out to g5, and that has one good thing and a bad thing. The good one is that you don’t have that bad piece on c1 doing nothing and your probabilities to attack are certainly better.
The bad thing is that you leave the b2 pawn undefended in the opening and if black knows how to seize it he can get advantage out of that. Attacking the b2 pawn is a good strategy for black, quickly playing c5 and playing Qb6 is thematic.
Both sides have many plans, but in synthesis black should play in the queenside while white will go for the kingside attack. Black must act quickly, otherwise white will have time to arrange his pieces and attack.
White usually goes for f4 and he could push on f5 (if there is a black pawn on e6 to breakthrough). White can also push g4-g5, this idea will be combined with a powerful knight posted on e5.
Black should try to stop this by developing and reacting in the center, maybe playing f6 at some point.
Torre attack sample games
First, we will see a game by the grandmaster Duda.
Let’s have a look at another great example, and see how black could win counter play against the Torre attack.
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