Alonzo Wheeler Jerome was not Emil Josef Diemer who was not Mikhail Tal...
Still, I had to smile the other day as I was catching up on Tom Purser's Blackmar Diemer Gambit blog (see the "Tom'sBDGPages" link on the lower right) when I ran across his post on "Correctness".
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
"Correctness"
In his book, Vom Ersten Zug an auf Matt [Toward Mate From the First Move], Diemer included a short essay on correctness (a propos -- KORREKTHEIT!, p. 129), in which he insisted that if the BDG were a "correct gambit" then it would be no gambit at all. Tonight I read an interesting piece by Dutch grandmaster Jan Hein Donner, (who once wrote a separate devastating article on Diemer called "The Prophet von Muggensturm").
He didn’t care about correctness, complications were more important to him. To drag his opponent with him into the labyrinth, he gave everything for it. I’ve seen it in Zürich, the growing feeling of unease when he sacrificed a piece or more in every game, and won, but when afterwards it turned out the whole enterprise had been rather risky if only the opponent would have found the right moves behind the board. In analysing, too, it turned out that, although he had calculated much and much more than the average player, he did very much tend to calculate in his own favour. Even then it became clear that only Keres could stand up to him in such analysis sessions where hands grab and reach over the board. ‘Aber mein Lieber, was machen Sie denn darauf!’ [But my darling, what do you play now?] and Tal just laughed. ‘Wer hat gewonnen?’ [Who has won?] (…)
Tal? Tal? Forgive me if I mislead you. Here Donner was writing about Tal. Not about Diemer. You can read the entire piece in this post in Chess Vibes. (scroll down to the bottom of the page).Of course, neither Purser nor Donner were writing about playing the Jerome Gambit, either; but I hope I did not mislead any Reader.
Still, isn't that what we do when we play the Jerome: drag our opponents with us "into the labyrinth"?
