King's Indian Defense
also known as: KID
1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3
Named after
"Indian" honors Moheschunder Bannerjee, a Bengali player of the 1850s whose fianchetto systems against John Cochrane in Calcutta gave all "Indian" defenses their name.
Origin
Sporadic for a century, then rehabilitated in the 1940s by Bronstein, Boleslavsky and Geller, who proved Black's counterattack was real.
The story
Cochrane, a British barrister in India, recorded hundreds of games against "the Brahmin," whose native rules (pawns moving one square) had taught him fianchetto structures Europeans found bizarre. A century later, Soviet analysts turned the despised setup into the most dangerous counterattacking defense in chess: Black concedes the entire center, castles, and then launches ...e5, ...f5, ...g4 at White's king while White storms the queenside — a race where Black's prize is checkmate. Bronstein nearly won a world title with it; Fischer and Kasparov made it a legend; Kasparov abandoned it in 1997 only after Kramnik kept beating him with his own weapon.
Why it matters
Chess's great asymmetric bargain: space now versus attack later. The mutual-races middlegame it produces (Mar del Plata structure) is one of the most studied and most terrifying in theory — engines have blunted it at the top, but below the stratosphere it remains a king-hunter's home.
Notable games
- Taimanov–Najdorf, Zurich 1953 (the classic ...g4 avalanche)
- Kasparov's KID masterpieces vs Karpov
- Fischer's "game of the century"-era KIDs