Benoni Defense

Pros

• KID/benoni: love it, especially when i trade my e pawn and they take back with their c pawn... not to mention the mar del plata positions, peak chess
• Benoni is a viable option to play for a win. For model games, you might check out Life and Games of Mikhail Tal, which has 6 Modern Benoni games annotated. For theory, I guess you would need to know the knife flick and a couple of other...
• I also have a lot of fun with the Benoni, but I'm really scared to play it OTB.
• Love the Bf4 / h3 / e3 setup to detah. I'm fine with Benoni imbalances, since they're so much in White's favor.
• Benoni is a nice weapon against 1.d4. It's fun and very effective as a suprise, allthough as a main weapon obviously slightly less solid compared to QGD.

Cons

• Personally, I recommend not touching the Benko or any Benoni at all.
• But i have mixed results with the benoni overall. I drew some 1850 fide guys with it. I play this delayed e6 benoni variation. But now i tried the real modern benoni with playing e6 right after d5 and its a little better. But i am kind o...
• it is well known that one of the best responses to 3g3 is the Benoni, and not for a bad reason. White doesn’t get the control he gets in other lines of the Benoni (I’m talking about 1.5 engine advantage which is quite a lot), and black c...
• I have a really bad record against the Benoni, whether it’s Nf6 c5, Nf6 e6 c5, Modern and Benko.
• You will also be absolutely tortured in the Benoni. I remember analyzing Nf3-Nc3-Nfd2 and that position with white I'd take any day of the week.