French defence

Posted on March 4th, 2013 by Richard

Against 1.e4 I play 1…e6 and start the French defence. I have mentioned this before in my other posts and I have done a video or two with my French games and now I add a little more on the French defence.

After 1.e4 e6 the game can continue in several ways and it is useful to know something about these if you play 1.e4 e6 -the French Defence. 3 mainline French variations are Advance/Classical/Tarrasch variations and White can play other ways and commonly this might be a Kings Indian Attack with d3 or French sidelines such as the French Reti gambit & Wing gambits.

Against the French Advance Black often employs the Wade variation with Qb6. Then Black will try & play on the Queenside while White may try to play on the Kingside.

The French Exchange is just a very boring opening by White! It actually has a notable drawing record and imho is a very unimaginative way for White to play against the French. It tends to lead to very symmetrical positions and Black often remains the opening tempo down. So I always like to develop quickly and not give White any tempo with a6/h6 type moves until castled & fully developed. This openings main challenge is to look further ahead and prepare for a slow attritional game-not something I enjoy but needs to be taken seriously before one player gets too bored & makes mistakes!

Against the Classical is the Winawer with Bb4 (pinning Nc3) but White can reply with Qg5 pressurising Black’s kingside. There is a lot of theory to the Winawer (including Poisoned Pawn variation). Presently I do not play this as I have not taken up the challenge to play this very sharp opening. Instead against either Classical (Nc3) or Tarrasch I play dxe and go for either Rubinstein variation (Nd7) or I have just become aware of the Fort Knox variation with Bd7 & next Bd6 which have less theory for Black but also good chances for White.

I have played a few Fort Knox blitz games but unfortunately I do not seem to have saved any to show here.
I believe GM Neil McDonald plays this but I have only seen a video of him losing with it!(against GM D Howell). Here is a link to Melbourne Chess Club YouTube video about it:
French Fort Knox at Melbourne Chess Club
I have already had mixed results with the Fort Knox variation and I look forward to playing it a bit more and comparing it against the French Rubinstein.

Against the Kings Indian Attack? Well frankly I do not know this well enough yet to pass comment. I must start to study this more now…

As White I am playing the Advance variation myself and exploring the Milner Barry Gambit in blitz with Bd3. I have not in general had great success with it yet but it is exciting & I am learning from my mistakes and feel it is appropriate for blitz games. If Black is not careful with the “Wade” Queen(!) it can become a target & be lost with a crushing advantage to White. This is where having some ideas of what possibilities an opening gives is helpful over just choosing moves at the time over the board. Playing moves at the time over the board is fine in general but you will probably miss opportunities that are there if you know more about the opening through some prior study and preparation of it.

Anyway I hope this gives a little insight into the French defence, an opening I play and which I need to explore more. The French defence is a rich & complex opening for Black & White & I j’aime la francais! I hope you enjoy playing with & against the French too-Viva the French! 🙂

Tags: Chess Openings
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Written by: Richard

I don’t believe it!

Posted on November 15th, 2012 by Richard

Wow it appears to be just over a year since my last post here!
If blog posting was a chess game I would have lost on time ages ago! I must have been doing too many other things (I have even started a football blog following Ipswich Town FC-bet there aren’t many of those around these days! Surprisingly I have kept it regularly updated-see the sidebar for a link to it).

So what can I report on my chess front?
My chess playing has taken a step back over the last season. I played some poorish games in my club play and lost too many and sadly I felt I could get not enough support to help me improve. So I took the decision not to join the chess club for this new season. I feel I get much more enjoyment playing blitz chess online and playing chess programs on the computer as OTB in the club. Actually I haven’t played that much chess on the computer. I did treat myself to Chess Position Trainer (CPT) and started to practice with it but I have not used it in many weeks. I still would like to improve my online blitz rating and did have a good game against a 1350 player today but the game was drawn just as I was about to deliver mate! (at least I didn’t lose). I have actually been doing more chess programming recently and have started blog posts about this ( see Chess Programming page on nav/menu-EDIT-I have just noticed this page is not working fully & I will need to adjust my WordPress theme files to fix this). I have also done a couple more chess videos (see them at my Youtube video page rpdatutube).

I did play a rapidplay tournament a while ago- the Thetford RapidPlay and did better than last year with 3/6 in the Minor section. I had x2 wins x2 draws and x2 losses-consistently mediocre!

ThetfordRapidPlayChess_150912

Finally I have recently had a good contact with another chess blogger Chris- he runs a fine chess site called Chess Musings. We have swapped links-see the link to his blog on the sidebar links.
Well of course I hope to do more regular posts on all aspects of chess here but for now happy chessing all! 🙂

Tags: chess, my chess games
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Written by: Richard

Chess programming introduction

Posted on November 15th, 2012 by Richard

Chess programming is a hobby I enjoy.

I have done several code snippets in several programming languages for help with computer chess play.
I do have an ambition one day to have programmed my own chess engine.

So far I have done a java chess engine but that was with the help of ThinkQuest and used sections of premade code. My very first introduction to chess programming was writing Perl scripts to clean and parse pgn files using regexes. I learnt a little bit of Perl programming and of course it is a great language for text & data wrangling & so quite suitable for chess.
I even made a perl script that takes a pgn file and outputs music! Quite amazing what is possible to do in programming.

This week I made the start of a console chess game in C. Getting a good board representation (and with a GUI if you want good graphics) is a basic first stage in chess programming. GUI=Graphical User Interface and is a nice frame to hold the chess game and display nice images like a real chessboard in as opposed to a basic text output at the console (command shell).See screenshot below:

2 player console chess in C

The next obstacle is to get the moves input and output & I struggled with this. It is a good, but for me, a hard learning curve and this was only for a basic console output without AI (AI=Artificial Intelligence)! Topics covered include array handling and string manipulation. Screenshot of part of the code in code editor below:

Code for chessgame in C

I started then to look at wrapping this all in a Windows GUI with a Win32 project in Visual C++ (MS Visual Studio) but this needs a lot more work. So there is still a lot more to be done with the chess logic and GUI programming. Great fun…..

I have also looked at chess in a web browser with JavaScript and HTML5. Hopefully I will do some posts on this later. The joys of chess are not just limited to playing but for me extend to programming too!

Tags: Chess programming, Chess Tournaments
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Written by: Richard

French defence Advance variation

Posted on October 17th, 2011 by Richard

I like the French defence. It is my favourite defence as Black vs White 1.e4 and as I play 1.e4 as White I often face it as White and am trying to learn & play the French Advance variation as White.

Off the top of my head now I cannot remember a specific French defence game as Black or White as good examples. I will try & look into this as I think it helps understanding of the openings if you can recall specific games. I do know Bobby Fischer played as White vs the Winawer variation several times. For the Black side I recall Botvinnik had some good French defence games & Unzinger specialised in it (Korchnoi must have played it too!-I will investigate!).

Well here is my latest chess video showing a 5min blitz game in the French Advance. I made several mistakes as White in this game & my opponent certainly made mistakes with a massive end blunder to lose the game!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzWXwG-fwwM&feature=channel_video_title[/youtube]

I intend to learn from my mistakes and improve my chess play & rating!!

Tags: Chess analysis, Chess game, Chess Openings, Chess Tournaments
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Petrovs Defence Nimzowitsch Attack variation

Posted on October 4th, 2011 by Richard

Today I played Numpty chess engine and won another game in the Petrovs C42 Nimzowitsch Attack variation.

I have posted this in a new video I have on my channel at YouTube. It actually shows 2 games against Numpty in this opening-the first a win for me as White & the second as a win for Numpty as Black.

This follows on from my last video that features in my previous post.

The games I show here I feel are quite interesting as the effect of central file and square control can be seen in this opening.

Here is the link to the video:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z4teVz7vg8[/youtube]

I have often found the Petrovs defence to be quite difficult to play against as White. There are a few traps-ask Vishy Anand-he went a piece down early on in a match in this opening & resigned the game!

However the Nimzowitsch Attack variation seems relayively easy to play!

Posted in chess games, Chess Openings, My Chess • 2 Comments »

Written by: Richard

New Club Season Starts

Posted on October 1st, 2011 by Richard

The new chess club match season has started. As a prelude to this 2 weeks ago I played in the minor Thetford RapidPlay chess tournament.

I didn’t have a good tournament & ended with only 21/2-6. I played a couple of good games and a couple of bad games and a couple of average games. One game I played poorly in was a Scotch Steinitz opening where I got in a mess as I mixed opening ideas and this has convinced me to look again at Scotch Steinitz (Qh4) opening again and at least try to understand and be confident in the mainline variation of this.

The photos here show Chris & Bob playing at Thetford too. Many thanks to Kevin Moore for organising the Thetford RapidPlay with the Dutch players from Spikenjisse.

Since Thetford I have played  a long play game in our BuryStEdmunds Suffolk team vs Ipswich. I played French Defence and lost!  I am determined now to play the French Defence better!

So I still have lots of work to do to improve my chess play. Here though is my chess video of a recent game of mine vs chess engine Numpty0.7pr. This was a Petrovs Nimzowitsch attack variation white win:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28WL3K0Vg80&feature=channel_video_title[/youtube]

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Written by: Richard