Wednesday, May 26, 2010

The most useful opening trap you've never seen

You won't see many GMs playing it, but both on the Internet and over the board a lot of players play a sort of closed Sicilian with Nc3, Bc4, Nf3, 0-0, d3, etc. Many years ago I discovered an opening trap with which I have caught literally dozens of players over the years. These include a high expert and two A-players in serious OTB games. The trap is little known and rarely published, although it is in Karsten Mueller and Rainer Knaak's excellent CD-ROM 1000 Chess Opening Traps, which ChessBase issued a few years ago. On ChessGames.com (which has over 500,000 games), I found only a game in which White fell into the trap, but Black overlooked the winning move! Instead of 7...b6?, do you see what Black should play?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I've probably won ten games this way.