Openings
I have discussed a few famous chess traps previously (Legal Trap, Elephant Trap, Lasker Trap, Mortimer Trap).
Today we will continue this topic with less known, but not-less-powerful traps that you can learn from and even use in your own games.
Want to win your games quickly using some of those powerful chess traps?
Here is the list of all 10 of them!
In the current update on ChessPublishing.com chessbibliophile draws your attention to a rare discovery in Nimzo and a curious line in QGD-Ed.
In his last article chessbibliophile offered a review of the site ChessPublishing.com:
From this month he would discuss selected opening updates from the site-Ed.
There are many games of chess being played each minute and even each second. There are players who play online blitz chess for fun and there are those who play standard 2-hour time control chess to make a living (they are called Grandmasters).
You know there are chess databases that store many of the games that were played, and therefore there is a pretty good statistics on those games, such as how many moves each game lasts, openings played, amount of draws, wins, and losses…
Today we will take a look into chess statistics and see what openings can lead to the best results for white and which ones are more favorable for black.
We will also see the list of top openings that lead to draws and which ones lead to the least amount of draws.
Here is another (last week I covered Elephant’s Trap) good trap to have in your arsenal. It is called Mortimer Trap. It occurs in the one of the most commonly played chess openings called Ruy Lopez.
Black plays a passive move with its Knight in order to trick White to accept the pawn which would gain Black some material in the long run.
Elephant Trap is the trap for White that occurs in a popular variation of Queen’s Gambit Declined. White pins the Black’s f6 knight and captures the d5 pawn not realizing that it’s actually them who blundered and about to lose a piece, and most likely a game. It is a ‘must to know’ trap to have in your repertoire if you are a d4 player or/and if you often face 1.d4.
Not only it will help you win some online blitz games, but it also can trick an unaware yet greedy over the board opponent and bring you an easy win. It also helps to know the classical traps so that you don’t become a victim of one and lose a game prematurely without the fight..It’s never good.
Today we’ll talk about something different rather than Rook Endgames that I was covering lately. If not endgames, than what, you may ask? Right, we are going to talk about openings, which is something opposite to the endgames. Don’t get disappointed yet since I’m not going to cover the openings you know and play on regular basis. Today’s topic is something a little bit different. We’ll talk about the openings you have no clue about. More specifically, we’ll discuss how to play the openings you never saw before and don’t even know they exist.
This article is a continuation of Rapid Chess Improvement: Evaluation of Positions, which covered the main things a chess player needs to work on in order to improve the game.
Opening repertoire is a very tricky thing to work on. You do not want to spend too much time studying opening lines which you may never play in actual game. At the same time you do need to know main lines because someone may decide to play them against you.
The Scotch Game received its name from a correspondence match in 1824 between Edinburgh and London. Popular in the 19th century, by 1900 the Scotch had lost favor among top players because it was thought to release the central tension too early and allow Black to equalize without difficulty. However, this opening is still very popular on “chess club” level, so every chess player should be familiar with it. The main idea of White’s 3.d4 is to dominate the center. However, Black, with the right play, can hold its own.
It is named after the famous 18th century player François-André Danican Philidor, who advocated it as an alternative to the common 2…Nc6. Today it is known for being a solid, but rather passive, opening for black. It is rarely seen in top level play. Philidor’s main idea behind the move 2…d6 was of course to protect the e-pawn, but most importantly to prepare immediate f7-f5 pawn push, attacking White’s e4 pawn. Since white already placed its knight on f3, the f2-pawn cannot be used to protect the e-pawn which makes Black’s idea possible.
