Thursday 16 February 2017

An End In Sight to the 2015/16 Hiatus

Hi all,

Apologies for the long period of time without any updates.  I also see that I've had several comments to my earlier blog posts, which I've neglected (during late 2015 and 2016).  I got a full-time job, lost the resolve to keep up what I'd previously been doing, and ended up leaving readers in limbo.

I am in the process of rebranding my site; the new address is at http://www.ianchessgambits.com/ and has moved to a paid hosting service.

Over the past year I also experimented with producing my own PDF articles.  Here's one that I came up with on the "Anti-Max Lange", 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 exd4 4.Bc4 Nf6 5.0-0 Nxe4.
http://www.ianchessgambits.com/uploads/1/9/3/3/19336435/the_anti_max_lange.pdf
The main source of inspiration for this was the old Chesscafe.com articles, particularly Tim Harding's often-excellent Kibitzer column.

As I felt I was able to express myself and my enthusiasm more through that type of article, I have a general idea of creating web articles in that sort of style with the aid of the new ChessBase dynamic diagrams, thereby allowing viewers to play through the lines or just generally experiment, without the need to be tied to the PGN format.  They also have a new game replayer which is good with PGNs with relatively short notes, but tends to be buggy if more than one replayer is used on a single web page.  But I'll need to experiment with this a bit.

I'm also preparing to move my chess blog to the new site, http://www.ianchessgambits.com/chessblog .  I hope to update that blog more frequently with other chess-related stuff as well as the progress on the openings/gambits articles, so that it doesn't go for long periods without any updates.

I expect progress on the chess gambits coverage to be quite slow this time around due to greater pressures on my time, but I haven't given up on it.  I am tempted to look into more in the way of 1.d4 lines, having played the Queen's Gambit (1.d4 d5 2.c4) from the white side quite a bit recently.

I'll have a look over some of the replies to my earlier articles over the weekend.

3 comments:

  1. Yeah, I missed you.
    But recently I also noted your website changed, which raised some hope.
    It doesn't really matter to me which lay out you prefer. What I do think important is that I can find information back quickly. Please take that into account.
    Finally I'd like you to remind you of 1.e4 e5 2.Bc4 Nf6 3.d4 exd4 4.Nxd4 Bb4+ 5.c3 dxc3 6.O-O O-O 7.a3 Be7 8.Nxc3 d6 and 9...Nc6.

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  2. Hmmm... I think my Urusov analysis dates from 2013 and is out of date. I see that I wrote that 7.a3 "may well be White's best bet here", but your suggested response is pretty much a refutation: it's basically a bad line of the Goring Gambit that I have had from the black side a few times recently (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 exd4 4.c3 dxc3 5.Bc4 d6 6.Nxc3 Nf6 7.0-0?! Be7, followed by 8...0-0), with the extra tempo a2-a3 for White, which I don't think significantly changes the assessment of the position (i.e. White has about half a pawn's worth of compensation). Also if 7.Nxc3 Nxc3 8.bxc3 Nxe4 looks hard to crack and has only scored 1/2 out of 2 in the two games I can find with it. So the lines with 7.e5 and 7.bxc3 need a fresh look.

    I think one of my first tasks will be to upload my old pgn files (currently hosted at 50Webs, on a site that I haven't updated in three years) onto my current site using the new ChessBase game replayer. I have hard copies of them on my hard drive.

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  3. It's more likely that with 7.a3 I was envisaging 7...Be7 8.e5, but this doesn't seem to work either: 8...d5 9.exf6 Bxf6! is strong (or 9.Bb3 cxb2 10.Bxb2 Ne4 11.Bxd5 Nc5).

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