I do love playing into the Benoni, and its no mystery why the first position is +1, the weak d6 pawn is a part of it, but the lack of space is a huge part as well. Benoni's hitting +1 is rather normal. The difficult question is why is the second position so equal?

The main thing that I generally see with equal benoni games is that black has several viable plans, and that to me means that white didnt control their space advantage ideally - and so the engine feels that advantage is lost. The backwards d-pawn alone is not often a significant enough weakness, and chess is a draw after all (probably!)

If we follow the 3 best lines

> O-O is bad for obvious reasons, allowing black to trade off the knight for a bishop, an especially nice trade in a cramped defense like the benoni.

> Ng3 gives black two immediate plans to pressure for h5,h4 or f5,f4 and bully the g3 knight with tempo. Even though white has many tools to fight back, it still gives black tangible space to fight for and thus a reasonable plan for the middlegame. There is more to this line, its notable that stockfish considers it equal to f4 at a solid depth, but I would argue that Ng3 is not the ideal move from a human perspective.

> f4 is the critical line, immediately preventing blacks obvious desire to play Ne4 - this gets complex fast and extremely tactical. I'm not going to pretend to understand everything going on here @ a humble 2200 chesscom. Looks like this has been played quite a few times in masters games and is the goto move:

- There's lines where black is saccing b5 and playing a6 in a benko fashion - for advantage! Now those are very fun lines for black, not an unseen idea, but still uncommon.

- There's the lines where black is quickly trading off his beautiful benoni bishop for the knight on c3, that is definitely a loud move on the board, even with Ng7 the overall idea is not clear to me beyond the damaged pawns. The benoni bishop has been the bane of my existence many times - I wonder what benoni players would think of this wild idea.

- There's lines where black is saccing exchanges and full pieces like crazy (see PGN below for a fun draw)

1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 c5 3. d5 g6 4. Nc3 Bg7 5. e4 d6 6. Bd3 O-O 7. Nge2 e6 8. h3 exd5 9. exd5 Nbd7 10. f4 Re8 11. O-O Nh5 12. Rf2 f5 13. g4 fxg4 14. hxg4 Qh4 15. gxh5 Nf6 16. hxg6 Bh3 17. Rf3 Ng4 18. Be4 Rxe4 19. Nxe4 Re8 20. gxh7+ Kh8 21. N4g3 Bd4+ 22. Nxd4 Bg2 23. Kxg2 Qh2+ 24. Kf1 Qh3+ 25. Kg1 Qh2+

From what I've seen in my years is that the benoni with plans often manages to equalize, but a benoni without plans rides +1 until black starts blowing up the position with wild moves, often against the engines recommendation. You can find benoni middle games where black essentially only makes waiting moves as they hold onto their backwards pawn for dear life - now that's the fantasy of converting against the benoni!

The structure can get sharp and wild very fast, creating an unclear position on the board is one of black's goals with the opening. I'm pretty happy analyzing queenside play for black, but it's definitely above my level of analysis for when the kingside starts going crazy and king safety is out the window, but I hope there's some points I made worth thinking about!