Chess Glee v Chessic Sense (commentary thread)

[RTFirefly]

Since glee is providing commentary in the original thread, I thought it might be of service to move that commentary to the thread where others are invited to chip in with their 2¢ worth.

@glee

Glee Chessic Sense
1.d4 Nf6
2. c4 e6
3. Nc3 Bb4
4. a3

(if 4. … Bxc3+ 5. bxc3)

Thanks to Chessic Sense for conditionals (which speed the game up) and to Mosier for his helpful diagrams.

This opening for Black is the Nimzo-Indian defence (named after Grandmaster Nimzovich) and I am playing the Saemisch variation.
White gets the two bishops and a pawn majority in the centre. However this comes with doubled pawns, giving an interesting, unbalanced* game.
I have played this a lot as Black, so it should be fun to try the White side of things.

*unbalanced in rhe sense of ‘not likely to end in a draw’, rather than crazy!

I think I may hang around and watch. Back in my playing days (40 years ago), nobody ever played the Nimzo-Indian against me (partly because I didn’t open with d4 that often, but when I did, I saw mostly the Queen’s Gambit Declined and the King’s Indian), and my usual answer as Black to d4 was the Grunfeld. So I’ve got little sense of how things go in a Nimzo-Indian.