Tuesday, June 26, 2012
...Nxc4??
How many people do you suppose have blundered with ...Nxc4??, dropping a piece to Qa4+? I'm thinking that the number is literally in the billions. Note, incidentally, that Black's 1.d4 d6, an opening without a name, can already be considered a little bit of a trap. The best responses are 2.e4 (with a possible transposition to a Pirc after 2...Nf6 3.Nc3 g6, although 2...e5!? and 2...Nf6 3.Nc3 e5!? are also reasonable) or 2.Nf3, as in this game. If White plays the natural 2.c4?!, 2...e5! already gives Black a plus score, especially if White trades queens with 3.dxe5?! dxe5 4.Qxd8+. Instead, 3.Nc3
is still OK for White, transposing to a line of the English that arises after 1.c4 e5 2.Nc3 d6 3.d4!? - as long as he doesn't follow Hübner-Kasparov, Hamburg 1985, a crushing win for Black.
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2 comments:
"Literally in the billions"?
By "people who have blundered" I meant "times people have blundered" - so one player could blunder a number of times during the course of his/her chess-playing life. How many people on Earth currently play chess - a billion maybe? And how many have there been in the last 500 or so years that the queen has moved the way it has? And how many times has one of those people blundered with ...Nxc4??, and the opponent responded with Qa4+! ? I must have personally been the recipient of such largess hundreds of times, and I suppose been the victim some much smaller number number of times. (Admittedly, I surely am NOT an average person in this respect.) "Literally in the billions" seems reasonable to me. Do you disagree?
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