The French Plus Scenario

I call it the French Plus Scenario in my courses.

If White goes 4.Nf3 then Bg4 and we put our pawns on the light squares. When White plays Be2 Black is usually completely fine. Bxf3 is good, in fact the Bf3 is useless for White for the time being.

I have never played the French but this is intuitively nice.

I like >>> 4) Bg5

@KNIGHT_c4 said in #2:
> I like >>> 4) Bg5

My indroduction to the Chapter 4.Bg5:

"The early development of the bishop to g5 is aimed at the future pin of the f6-knight and plans the advance f2-f4. The so-called Byrne System is a viable option against the regular Pirc. For example, against ...g7-g6, plans with Qd2 followed by Bh6 or f4, accompanied by an early advance e5, are possible. However, against our setup without ..g6, all the tricks hit thin air and the bishop on g5 is often more vulnerable than effective. The planned long castling is also not very powerful for White. This is a typical scenario: what is considered strong and effective against the usual Pirc rings hollow against the Czech Pirc and Philidor, nevertheless it is chosen on a regular basis – that's the secret. Surprisingly, with our proposed way of play, we often end up in the Veresov attack, a side-line in the realm of the Closed games. Somewhat less surprising are transitions to Philidor. Some of the reference games also originally started from these openings and lead to our theory via different move orders."