Quote: If you want to improve you have to learn how to take advantage of silly setups like this one.
that's just it, the french in particular, it's a french formation to me no matter what you want to call it, has always annoyed me.
as i've said before, i just don't get positional. the french denies me any targets to attack, and trips me up positionally exactly like in that embarrassing miniature that illustrates the kind of trouble i get into when my development is interfered with and found in most of my sicilians before the morra (drives me nuts in king's gambit a lot) and i can't get the same kind of piece co-ordination i'm getting in most of my morra games.
of course i'll learn a lot more about the drawbacks in the morra i'm not learning just yet and will start testing more solid lines when i break out of 1700 maybe, but for now, just trying to get up their requires me to play games and have tactical fun exactly like i'm having now.
for now, it's absolutely a boon to my ratings. 50:50 in the sicilian is more than a 200% improvement, so there's the source of my current enthusiasm. it's just fun to play and that should matter more than ratings anyways.
when i get to 1800 and am a bit more ready for the open and infinite variation memorization brain freeze as i doubt i'll ever understand positional as i've forgotten even pawn endings and lose in them, but am not going to ever lose a 2 bishop end game. i understood that "positional" principle immediately as it's tactical to me, just corner the king and give up a tempo. boom.
smith morra is a stopgap while i book up on other openings in my repertoire redo, and i fully intend to study it seriously to get to that 1800 where it can become my plan b surprise.
for now, it works for me except for this hideous new variation that puts white down 2 points and that can't be sidestepped by at least fritz 6 or crafty. oh well... in for a penny, in for two pounds.
the reason i love amateur level play in the morra is i get the nice central action most of the time, but blocking Bc4 with the french makes playing it look stupid to me and Bb2 makes more sense even if i'm long diagonal blind.
i'm going to look at the line with a bunch of engines looking for something that looks better than Bc4 and that has scoring potential in the right continuation.
for me, the morra is a perfect learning tool to get back into the 1600s for now. it has the comfort of the stonewall more often than not with even more fireworks than king's gambit, and makes enough sense that it's easy for me to find the correct continuations more often than i'm prone without memorized theory.... win win win
the only way i ever got to 1650 was memorizing theory so i don't fall to positional trap after trap like that one exploiting my "queen direction change" blind spot missing at least a few queen checks followed by rank sweeping take tactics as i just saw recently in my vector gambit game, but i eventually saw it after some simplification.
i withdraw any implications i made have made thinking langrock was just a smith morra data dumper as he played for 1 win & 3 draws against strong rated opponents versus zelic scoring a little lower in 6 games with two losses in 1.e4 c5 2.d4 cxd4 3.c3 dxc3 4.Nxc3 e6 5.Nf3 a6 6.Bc4 b5 7.Bb3 Bb7 8.0-0
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Smith-Morra Resources? (Read 89709 times)
