A number of other grandmasters have successfully played the Catalan, including Fabiano Caruana, Daniil Dubov, Anish Giri and Ding Liren.

It had been played a few times before Tartakower's usage in the tournament, however: for instance, Réti–Leonhardt, Berlin 1928 transposed into an Open Catalan.

The opening cemented itself in the repertoire of leading players of the 1930s and 1940s, such as world champions Jose Raul Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine and Mikhail Botvinnik, as well as top grandmasters such as Salo Flohr, Paul Keres and Samuel Reshevsky.

In 2004, Ruben Felgaer won a tournament celebrating the 75th anniversary of Barcelona 1929 and the birth of the Catalan Opening, ahead of Grandmasters (GMs) Viktor Korchnoi, Mihail Marin, Lluis Comas and Viktor Moskalenko and International Master Manel Granados.

The Open Catalan line has been a favorite of Anatoly Karpov and Efim Geller as Black and of Oleg Romanishin as White.