Something New in Something Old

There is a phrase in chess, "annotation by result", which refers to the practice of judging a move or a series of moves by the outcome of the game. Won game? Good move! Lost game? Bad move!

Strong, inquisitive and creative players work against this tendency and are often rewarded with new ideas and positive results over-the-board.

Consider Yury V. Bukayev, whose opening discoveries have been mentioned here before. Recently, Yury has been looking at the Fritz Variation in the Two Knights Defense.

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Nf6  4.Ng5 d5 5.exd5 Nd4

To quote from "Having Fun with the Two Knights" from Chess Asia, Volume 11, Issue 3, 1995, by Bobby Ang,

By way of a short historical background, this is known as the Fritz/Schlechter Variation, used by Hans Berliner extensively in his rise to first place in the World Correspondence Championship. Indeed, it seems to be a lot more logical than the usual 5...Na5 which locks the knight out of play on the edge of the board.

Some of our readers might be wondering how this opening got its name. In fact, if you are in possession of the excellent book by Warren Goldman on Carl Schlechter which is a biography and a collection of most of the wins of "The Austrian Chess Wizard", you might have noticed that this variation does not even appear even once. Lest you think that he lost all his games with this line we hasten to note that this Defense was suggested by the German player Alexander Fritz to Schlechter who analysed it in Deutsche Schachzeitung in 1904, thus the name.

6.d6

This line has largely been dismissed by the sources that I consulted.

6...Qxd6 7.Bxf7+ Ke7 8.Bb3 Nxb3 9.axb3 h6 10.Nf3

Black has good play for his sacrificed pawn in Bogoljubov - Rubinstein, Stockholm, 1919. He enjoyed his "two Bishops" and transitioned to one of those Rooks-and-pawns engame that he was famous for winning. What else did Bogoljubov expect? seemed to be the concensus of the observers.

Yury, in an email he sent me, enthused 

I think this new gambit is a distant relative (!!) of the Classical Jerome Gambit. Thus, the difference of Black's and White's material in my gambit and in Classical Jerome Gambit is the same after the acceptance of these gambits; the initial position (3.Bc4) is the same; White plays Bc4xf7; White plays without the white-squared bishop in result; Black's king is on f7 a in variant of acceptance of gambits etc.

I think that the line is interesting enough that I would point it out, even if it were not "Jerome-ish", but I can't resist sharing an odd line from the Blackburne Shilling Jerome Gambit Declined: 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 c6 3.Bc3 Nd4 4.Bxf7+ Ke7 (we have seen this before) 5.Ng5 (a bit unusual, but many people play the move in many Jerome variations) Nf6 6.Bb3 Nxb3 7.axb3 d5 8.exd5 h6 9.d6+ Qxd6 10.Nf3 and, indeed, we have reached that position from Bogoljubov - Rubinstein, above!

10...e4 11.Ng1

A gloomy retreat. An unkind annotator might say White is already lost.

An Italian correspondence game between Antritter and Balletti in 1969 introduced 11.Nh4, but White lost in 18 moves. A rather obscure game played in Tennessee in the United States, 15 years later, R. Carpenter - S. McGiffert, tried an improvement, but White lost in 13 moves.

Yet, Antritter and Carpenter were on the right trail.

I will leave it to readers to visit Yury's website and learn about the "Nh4-Bukayev-gambit" which gives White new hope!