If you consider the year 1997 still as the modern times then likely you aren't that young anymore. So I wasn't surprised at all to discover that the author of the recently published article a romantic opening in modern times is already 53 years old. In the 2 last decades chess made a metamorphose.
Advertisements should never be accepted blindly. The purpose of the article is foremost to sell the new DVDs on the King's gambit produced by the British grandmaster Simon Williams so you don't want to spoil it by giving trivial facts like it hasn't been played in the most recent years in classical chess by the top-grandmasters.
Besides if you are no such super-grandmaster then I am sure you still encounter regularly those romantic openings. There are still many amateurs ignoring the objective evaluation of the openings and believe they will be able to profit from the lack of knowledge and low competence of their opponents (mostly also amateurs). However I do notice a change in the type of player loving to play those risky openings. When I started playing chess more than 2 decades ago it were mainly young players with an aggressive style. Nowadays it are mostly older players using some old forgotten gambits.
In above table, I made a summary of the romantic openings which I met on the board in classical games from +2100 rated players. You can argue what exactly is a romantic opening but the trend is clear. In the first years we see mainly yellow so strong young players below 30 year. In the most recent years we see almost exclusively green so players older than 50 playing those obscure openings.
I see currently a growing nostalgia but also many older players are blaming the youth of not knowing the classics. Young players only study the openings played by today's best players which makes them vulnerable for the traps hidden in many romantic openings. I hear some of those young ones complain as it is lame to win games based on traps instead of real chess. You can't make progress by just trying to score easy points that way and you definitely can't use it twice against the same opponent.
Many older players lack the drive and energy to keep developing and improving themselves. It is no coincidence that almost no +2300 plays a romantic opening in standard chess. Only 3 out of 63 opponents in the table had a +2300 rating. When I discuss this with young strong players then I can't convince them to give a romantic opening a try even if I can show them a fresh idea. Why would they spend a lot of effort for 1 game as next time the opponent will already have prepared an anti-dote with the engine. Time is precious so you better use it for more solid openings which can be used in a repertoire much longer.
Anyway at some point everybody hits their maximum. There is nothing wrong from then onward to choose a romantic repertoire which you enjoy. Eventually fun is the only track to keep playing chess and nobody else can tell you better than yourself what you like or not. Besides if you can stay below the radar of the databases (so mainly below 2300 elo) then it is often possible to become very successful with romantic openings.
A nice example is the expert living in Gent, Nouri Zouaghi. Last year he surprised me in the interclubs with a risky line in the Schliemann-gambit but he was able to compensate the doubtful reputation of the opening by a much better understanding of the position. We created an interesting game.
After the game it became apparent how different our styles are. While I was focusing on the defects of the black opening, Nouri considered a 0,6 disadvantage shown as evaluation by the engine, fully acceptable for black.
However when I met again Nouri this year with the same colors in the interclubs, I was again surprised by the same risky line of the Schliemann-gambit. How? Well I couldn't imagine somebody playing twice the same risky line against the same opponent. I don't know if it was ignorance of Nouri or something else. Anyway I am not the person to avoid a challenge (see a theoretical battle in the Svechnikov.)
The top-engines prefer 6.Nh4 to 6.Ng5 but it is not simpler for white at all. Black again had a better nose for the complications and afterwards I could only admit that refuting a romantic opening isn't always easy.
Naturally this is even harder when you get less time for a game. When you lack the time to remember the accurate moves or to calculate the details then a romantic opening can be a very dangerous weapon. It makes a lot of sense not to refute it in such quick games but just try to avoid the complications. A successful example was executed of that strategy in a decisive rapidgame played last year against the Belgian FM Sim Maerevoet.
Naturally this is even harder when you get less time for a game. When you lack the time to remember the accurate moves or to calculate the details then a romantic opening can be a very dangerous weapon. It makes a lot of sense not to refute it in such quick games but just try to avoid the complications. A successful example was executed of that strategy in a decisive rapidgame played last year against the Belgian FM Sim Maerevoet.
I knew a few things about the Elephantgambit (Quality Chess announced last year to publish a book about it) but 3..Nf6 was for me unknown. Later I discovered that you can also enter the same position via the Russian opening : 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.Pxe5 d5 and is one of the many original ideas of the eccentric Georgian grandmaster Baadur Jobava. More than likely Sim borrowed the idea from him.
In the article I mix romantic chess and romantic openings. However we can also split them into a theoretical part (the opening) and a practical part (the middle-game). Jobava demonstrates that romantic chess is still today playable even at the highest level on the condition your opponent hasn't studied yet your new idea. On the other hand the romantic openings (19th century mainly) are only acceptable at the level of the amateur.
Brabo
In the article I mix romantic chess and romantic openings. However we can also split them into a theoretical part (the opening) and a practical part (the middle-game). Jobava demonstrates that romantic chess is still today playable even at the highest level on the condition your opponent hasn't studied yet your new idea. On the other hand the romantic openings (19th century mainly) are only acceptable at the level of the amateur.
Brabo
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.