The Accelerated Dragon ⎸Sicilian Defense Theory

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The Accelerated Dragon is one of the sharpest and most fun openings in chess. It’s unforgiving, and it gives you no room for mistakes. The side that manages to get an attack going faster is usually going to win the game.

If you are unfamiliar with the Sicilian Defense, I’d recommend the introductory video in which I covered the ideas for both sides as well as all most common theoretical lines briefly: youtu.be/impkeLfyyVM

Here are two games I played as white against the Accelerated Dragon. In the first one my opponent made a theoretical mistake early on and I managed to exploit it and convert easily. In the other one, I made a mistake but it went unpunished. Perhaps these two games could serve as an example of what can occur out of the opening: Tomic vs Bojanic youtu.be/4_o_vmB67i0
Tomic vs Blaga youtu.be/qJqkQYMb2sE

The opening occurs after the moves:

1.e4 c5
2.Nf3 Nc6
3.d4 cxd4
4.Nxd4 g6 – the move g6 signifies the accelerated dragon. As opposed to the normal dragon, black wastes no time fianchettoing his bishop and castling kingside. White has three ways to react to this aggressive opening choice.
5.Nc3 is the main line
5.c4 is the Maroczy Bind variation, and the most solid way for white to look for an advantage
5.Nxc6 is the exchange variation and it’s probably the worse of the three for white. Black immediately gets a central pawn majority which can be useful in any endgame scenarios.

Players whose games you should study (for the black side): Magnus Carlsen (vs Morozevich, 2013; vs Caruana 2014), Vassily Ivanchuk (vs Leko 2007). There are many other, but I think these two can provide two completely approaches to the opening.