Let's make a deal. You take back that monkey brain nonsense - the modify button is very handy - and I'll delete my last post and give you a serious reaction on 11.0-0/12.b3. You have 22 hours.

No no no, my dearest Kylemeister, I just have seen the light! Master Moody has shown me! It's you who hasn't realized (yet? I hope so much for your well-being!) that all our monkey brains have been mislead by the examples of Timman, Shirov, Beliavsky, Spassky, Van der Sterren, Malaniuk and others, who all have faced the forced win 4.Ng5!! and still dared to score points as Black! The blasphemists! They must have bribed their opponents! They are not as honorable as Naiditsch, who was foolish enough to chose 3...Nf6??, but still had the good taste to lose a few games!
Let's all repent and throw us at the feet of Master Moody, the only one in the entire Universe whom we should set our hopes on to cure us from our monkey brains. Let's all revel in his Masterly Teachings of Development, Endgame and Middlegame, then after a long and painful therapy there is a chance that we may call ourselves human again.

Sloughter, consider that when your opponents' arguments seem silly to you, maybe that's because you have not really understood what they're saying. If you really think any of the posters on this thread don't know what a pawn island is, think again.

I don't have a clue about the Berliner variation, but all your strategic considerations and discussions of middlegame versus endgame sound to me like the kind of thinking you do BEFORE you get down to concrete analysis (with a brain, computer or both), not INSTEAD of it. Now MNb, Micawber and Markovich have been trying to tell you, with impressive composure, that they and others have already done quite a bit of analysis on these lines, and your bold statements (with scant evidence) don't impress them.

Can you deal with that and join in an objective analysis without assuming everyone else is an idiot?

Muir came up with the correct refutation of the Berliner Variation which was obvious once I plugged it into Fritz 8 i.e my 13.Qf2 was a positional treatment when I should have opted for tactics; obviously, once I could actually see 13.Qf2 on a chessboard, it was clearly a blunder. 

Here is the simple refutation of one line of the Berliner Variation: 4.Ng5 d5 5.exd5 Nd4 6.c3 b5 7.Bf1 Nxd5 8.Ne4 Qh4 9.Ng3 Bg4 10.f3 e4 11.cxd4 Bd6 12.Qe2 (The Muir Variation) O-O (No better or worse than 12...Be6) 13.fxg4 (Not so much win material, which it does, but more importantly keeping the e-file closed) 13...Bxg3ch 14.Kd1 & Fritz 8 has this as +- after an eventual Qxb5. Anyone care to equalize?

What the wonderful members of this post don't seem to understand is that after 10.Qa4, this is an ENDGAME not a MIDDLEGAME. In other words all your suggestions that apply in a MIDDLEGAME don't apply in an ENDGAME. The only reason I suggested 10...Nc5 was to avoid a losing endgame by staying in an inferior middlegame a pawn down with better practical chances than an endgame where a strong Grandmaster has 30-40 moves to grind out the win in what is known as a "cat and mouse" position i.e. excellent winning chances and no losing chances, just the kind grandmasters love.

Here is what I mean by middlegame strategies. When you castle in response to 10...Ndf4, getting the King out of the center in the middlegame makes sense in the middlegame, makes no sense in the endgame. In the endgame, the King should be moving towards the center, not the edge of the board. So you can scrap any ideas like Kf1 (in the endgame), ideas like meeting Ndf4 with Bxf4?? or playing f5, which gives the King an invasion route on e6 in the endgame.

When you people don't realize that White invested ten tempos just to compromise Black's Queenside structure in the endgame, while all the Two Knights' Tango does is to dance around and accomplish nothing useful. Do any of you know what a pawn island is?

When you people don't recognize that 11.d4 is forced or that 11...Nxg2ch is forced. When you don't realize that 11...Nxg2ch 12.Ke2 gains a tempo over 12.Kf1 or that 13.Kf3 gains a second tempo in the endgame. 

When you people don't know that by some strange coincidence that after Rc2, White defends b2 in case of Rb8 without losing time, but that after Nxg2, Black must eventually spend a tempo to protect the pawn on g7 after White plays Rg1.

You people don't have a clue what chess strategy is; all you know is how to plug a chess position into a computer and spit out results.

I am reminded of the comment made by Steinitz when a kibitzer said to him, "Herr Steinitz. I do not understand your style of play!" Steinitz responded, "That's easy. Did you ever see a monkey play with a watch?"

I feel I am working with a bunch of monkeys who know what the chess pieces can do without understanding the game.

HgMan wrote on 01/04/09 at 22:55:55:

Ah, less off-topic than I thought then. It was the pseudo move-numbering that misled me 

Quote:

OK, I bite. Sorry for the off-topic but I am curious.

What on earth are White's moves in this sequence??? I can see 1. d4, 2. c4, 3. d5, but does White play 4. c5 to make Nxd5 a plausible move, and if so, why on earth does he do that? Beyond that I have less and less idea as the moves progress.

MNb wrote on 01/05/09 at 12:34:27:


Time is on my side. It often takes me years to develop and test ideas, not a matter of a few hours without a computer, chessboard or literature. Usually when I am interested in a critique of my ideas, I rely on GM Lev Alburt. I think I'll stick with him.

Good bye

Sloughter

sloughter wrote on 01/05/09 at 14:04:27:

Don't do this in your head. 13...f5 is another obvious improvement. Retreating a nicely centralized knight to a rather useless square (13...Ng6?) will not even be considered by any experienced gambit player, no matter his/her strength. Of course White should play 12.Kf1 instead of 12.Ke2/f3, but again Black is slightly better developed (just count how many move both players need to activate all their pieces). Your claim +- misses a solid foundation.

sloughter wrote on 01/05/09 at 14:04:27:

Doubt is a source of knowledge, as we know since Descartes. And the fact that some pretty strong players have chosen 3...Nf6 is a good reason for doubt.

If you count how many moves the black knights have made, then also count White's useless ones. Or easier, just count in the final positions how many active pieces both players have. Eg after FM Dikkie's 14...Rb8 Black has three pieces in play, White two. Then it does not matter how many times some pieces have moved - a chess position does not have a memory.

The reason nobody's interested in your refutations of Berliner's ...Qh4, the Traxler and 4...Nxd5 is that it suffices to find one equalizer for Black. At the moment we have two: 4...b5/8...Ne6 and 4...Na5.

sloughter wrote on 01/05/09 at 20:47:26:

Now we are getting somewhere. You know, gambit players know this advise as well, so they usually refuse the returning of material. You could have read that in a more than 70 years old book. Rudolf Spielmann wrote in Richtig Opfern (The art of Attack) that the attacking player only should take back material if it falls in his/her lap. The first, the second and the third goal of the attacker is to maintain his initiative, create threats and keep his/her attack going (in a random order). It's also often put this way: the typical goal of a gambit is not, I repeat not getting back the material at the first opportunity (and usually not on the second either). That's why 14...dxc3?? deserves two questionmarks indeed.