Talk:Indian Defence

History

Does anyone has a reliable source on the history of the Indian defence (name and origin)? From what I can find with google an Indian person called Mahesh Chandra Banerji, on the net aka:

• Firstname: Mohishunder/Mohischunder/Moheschunder/Moheshunder
• Second name: Bonnerjee/Bannerjee

played it against John Cochrane in Calcuta for the first time.

A couple of links: Voorlandt 15:52, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

Fianchetto

> The Indian Defences by g6 coupled with d6, or b6 coupled with e6, were largely taught to European players by the example of Moheschunder and other Indians, to whom the fianchetto developments were a natural legacy from their own game.

The quoted portion seems to imply that fianchetto was part of the Indian variant. However according to the rules of the Indian variant Chaturanga, the fianchetto movement is impossible. Infact during the play the bishop can never reach the square infront of the knight due to the peculiarity of movement (two squares diagonally always). So what is this quote refering to? Is it correct? Blufox (talk) 17:59, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Three White Knights?

Why are there 3 White Knights in some of these illustrations? Raz.you.up 18:24, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Someone made a mistake. I fixed it. Foobaz·o< 18:29, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Paleface attack

I don't think that http://www.chessarch.com/library/0000_eco/a45_a50.shtml qualifies as a reliable source for chess opening variations under wikipedia guidelines. Any variation mentioned here should have multiple (as in three or more) reliable sources. (The sources don't all necessarily have to be mentioned here, but they should be available.) Quale (talk) 22:19, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

First, I ask you to avoid what you did. You removed sourced content while only mentioning only a small formatting issue, about boldfacing. Disguising your edits is very unpolite, but I'll assume it was simply a mistake, given you later moved on to the talk page. I don't care about the bolding or not, I simply followed suit, keeping the article's style. But it is quite unpleasant to be reverted without any given reason.

Agreed that the given site is probably not the most known, and thus reliable by WP standards. It just happens that it is the one I use for myself, so it was fast to get there. Do a search for it and you'll easily see it exists (and it would take you less time than reverting twice and writing the previous warning). If you know of likely better sources - what are the MCO and NCO you mentioned in you next edit? - then please either use them, or point me to them in a non-cryptic way. - Nabla (talk) 13:08, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm sorry, you are correct that I did not handle that appropriately. Two is my limit and I will not revert again, so if you or anyone else thinks the page is improved by inclusion of the Paleface Attack you should put it back and I will not remove it. It is my opinion that it does not make the article better, but that is just my opinion and often my views are in the minority. The holidays have slowed the pace of chess editing but it may pick up in January if you want to get a third opinion to "break the tie". There's no need, however, as you should feel free to act on your own if you like and I will not object.

I was aware that the reason that a few variation names were in boldface was because this page is the redirect target for those variations, but I don't think that is a good idea here. Sometimes we do want to boldface a redirect target, such as Spanish Game on Ruy Lopez. That seems to me to be a very different case, as the bold appears very early in the lead and it's easy for the reader to see that Spanish Game is an alternate name. The boldface on this page appeared deep in article and 99% of the readers who did not get here by following Barry Attack will have no way to understand why a variation of relatively minor importance is boldfaced and the rest aren't. Another reasonable way to deal with this would be to use boldface for the first appearance of every variation name so that they are all treated alike.

As far as Paleface Attack goes, I only took a cursory look at the Google search but many of the results are web fora and blogs and thus also not reliable sources. It's clear from the search that the name is used, so I believe that acceptable sources can be found if someone takes the time to dig through them. For me it's a question of whether the inclusion of every obscure variation makes this article better. I think it does not. The list is already a bit too long for a novice to manage, and I don't think trying to make a complete list of every Indian variation would make it better. We already have List of chess openings that could be used for that. (That list is not developed uniformly in all sections. If you look you will see an unnecessary level of detail in A00 compared to the rest of the list.) When I expanded this article in 2007 my idea was that I would include the most important Indian variations, which were ones about which we had something significant to say more than "1.d4 Nf6 2.a4 is the Patzer Variation". I wasn't very conscientious about the need for inline sourcing five years ago, but everything I wrote was based on specific sources (mostly MCO and Burgess). If we have something sourced and interesting to say about the Paleface Variation more than just listing the moves, I think it should be included here as it is unlikely that the variation will deserve an article on its own.

Anyway, I'm sorry again for my rude behavior and I hope that this helps explain my thinking even if you don't agree. Quale (talk) 07:01, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Kmoch names

The Reti passage in Masters of the Chessboard is interesting but this is a second hand source. It would be better if someone can find the Kmoch source he is referring to. Just on the off chance someone has access to it, it might be in Nachtrag Zu P. R. V. Bilguer Handbuch Des Schachspiels Fur Die Jahre 1916-1929 ("Supplement to the Bilguer Handbuch for 1916-29"). MaxBrowne (talk) 08:51, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Australian Attack

There's absolutely no reference to this existing anywhere except this article and forums directly mentioning this article.

ThatChapThere (talk) 03:56, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Merge proposal

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Dayshade added merge proposal tags to merge East Indian Defence and Neo-Indian Attack into Indian Defence, but no discussion has taken place so I'm opening one here. I'm inclined to support a merger as they seem to be variations of the main subject, though it should also be discussed whether these two specifically need to be merged but not the other variations. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 18:33, 9 January 2026 (UTC)

I think these two are particularly good candidates because they're so short and don't come up a lot when discussing openings in practice due to a few reasons (e.g. for East Indian, it usually transposes into something else; for Neo-Indian, it's too rare). Are there any others you think should be merged? Dayshade (talk) 17:36, 11 January 2026 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The dangers of ill-conceived merges

The recent merges damaged this article as they leave it completely unbalanced. The merged lines are minor and that would seem to make a merge to a parent article wise, but in fact the actual result of the merge is to grotesquely imbalance this article. Three of the most important openings in this article are the Nimzo, the Queen's Indian, and the Gruenfeld. The merged text on the insignificant Neo-Indian attack is about 10 times longer than the discussion of the Nimzo, QI, and Gruenfeld combined. The visual weight accorded to an insignificant line is WP:UNDUE weight on this page. One try at remedying this would be to bulk up the Nimzo, QI, and Gruenfeld discussion, but that would make this page less useful as an overview. I've discussed this problem on talk pages of other chess openings but I don't think the issue is well understood.

Bad merge. Quale (talk) 05:55, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

@Quale: - Any other suggestions you have for a better merge besides expanding the nimzo/etc discussions a bit? One idea I'm considering is breaking 2...e6 3.Nc3 (Nimzo + some minor sideline discussion, e.g. 3...d5 allows the Exchange QGD) and 2...e6 3.Nf3 (anti-Nimzo) into their own second level headers, where the Nimzo subvariations would get their own third level headers, since this would give the Nimzo and the QI/Bogo/Blumenfeld (about the same theoretical importance combined as a nimzo, if not still less) combined their own comparable lengths, but not sure if this is a good idea, what do you think? I'm also going to trim down what is in Neo-Indian more, rename to Seirawan ideally, and maybe even put it into the "other lines" section as simply the longest text description present of many other lines. Dayshade (talk) 14:41, 25 February 2026 (UTC)