What is your most successful line versus the London setup ?

What do you play ?

Queen's Indian setups usually give me good results.

I play the London System with White. I think one of the best plans for Black is to create counterplay on the queenside. An interesting sequence of moves would be:

1.d4 e6 2.Nf3 d5 3.Bf4 Nf6 4.e3 Be7 5.Nbd2 O-O 6.Bd3 Nbd7 7.Qe2 c5 8.c3 c4 9.Bc2 b5

With the idea of breakthrough on b4.

just play normal like e6 d5 c5 setup and sometimes with b6 and Bb7 to control the e4 square to jump in with a Knight and you have a great position

There's a nice setup you can go for where you play d5, e6, c5 and then basically just point everything you've got at the e5 square - Bd6, Qc7, Nbd7 - with a view to a) putting the kibosh on the Ne5 manoeuvre that is the typical London player's one actual idea and b) pushing e5 yourself and dominating the centre. It's nice because it's a fairly principled response that doesn't rely on move order tricks or anything - white just doesn't fight too hard for control of the centre in the London, so why not take advantage of that - but also pretty powerful.

A better Queen's Indian/Hedgehog:

I started playing b6, Bb7, e6, f5, Nf6, and then hunt white's black bishop with my bishop and knight. At my level, if white loses the bishop, they tend to start to spiral down.

I've tried 2 setups after d5, Nf6, c5. One is e6 then Qb6 and if Qb3 c4 etc. The other is not to play Nc6 but instead O-O, b6 and Ba6. Also tried KID setup with Nc6, Nf6-d7 and forcing e5. No refutation but chess games where I have an idea how to play the MGs. -Bill-

@achja said in #1:
> What do you play ?

I mostly play the setup d5, e6, f5, knight f6, c6, bishop d6, queen e7, with variations within this move order.

Here’s a recent game against the London with this kind of setup (called Stonewall):



There’s also an instructive video from Eric Rosen from a fide rated game he played in Biel OTB where he played as black against the London:

youtu.be/Ie17GRG7sTY