Getting active on Chess.com during a difficult 2020

 As many will know, the year 2020 has been plagued by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has meant that I have played very little over-the-board chess this year.  However, I have been increasingly actively involved on Chess.com, playing mainly fast games, but also some correspondence type games as well.  It has to be said, though, that even though we're allowed 3 to 7 days per move in those games, in practice I rarely spend much longer on an individual move than I would over the board.

I am a member of a group known as "The Unsound Openers", which seems to me to be very apt, especially as 10-15 years ago I quite often played the Englund Gambit with 1.d4 e5 2.dxe5 Nc6 3.Nf3 Qe7, including using it once in a serious game.  

But when I recently revisited the most critical line of the Englund proper with the aid of Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero, the modern computers have been showing it to be even more unsound than I previously thought.  For example, in the position following 1.d4 e5 2.dxe5 Nc6 3.Nf3 Qe7 4.Bf4 Qb4+ 5.Bd2 Qxb2 6.Nc3 Bb4 7.Rb1 Qa3 8.Nd5! Ba5 9.Rb5 Bxd2+ 10.Qxd2 Kd8 11.e4 a6:

I examined this in some detail with Stefan Bucker back in the late 2000s, and we concluded that Black's defence is very difficult but that with best play Black might be able to hold, with White's poor pawn structure being the main source of hope for Black.  But Stockfish points out that 12.Rb3 Qxa2 13.Bc4! is very strong, with the idea of sacrificing the rook on h1 for an unstoppable attack after 13...Qa1+ 14.Ke2! (14.Qd1? Qxd1+ 15.Kxd1 leaves White with inadequate compensation for a pawn) 14...Qxh1 15.Qg5+ Nge7 16.Nxe7 Nxe7 17.Bxf7.  Black can play 13...Qa5 (or perhaps 12...Qa5 instead of 12...Qxa2) but White's attack appears to be close to winning in all lines.  The line 11.Ng5 Nh6 12.f4, suggested by Boris Avrukh, also appears to be close to winning.

Black's best bets appear to be 5...Qc5 (instead of 5...Qxb2, but this rather defeats the point of the opening) and 8...Bxd2+ 9.Qxd2 Kd8 (instead of 8...Ba5, or 8...Bxd2+ 9.Qxd2 Qxa2, whereupon 10.Rd1 is very strong) but they aren't much fun for Black either.  I had already given up on 3...Qe7 about 10 years ago, and on the rare occasions that I have used 1...e5 since, I have usually gone for 3...Nge7 instead, and these findings are unlikely to change that.

These days my openings tend not to be quite as unsound as that, but there are certainly a fair number that can be said to be at the margins of soundness, including the Blackmar-Diemer, the double pawn sacrifice in the Goring Gambit, the "Smerdon's Scandinavian" complex, the Albin Counter-Gambit and the Ruy Lopez Steinitz Defence Deferred piece sacrifice line 4...d6 5.0-0 Bg4 6.h3 h5.

I'm hoping that progress will pick up on updating my main chess website soon, as I've got to grips with the Chess.com game/analysis replayer (which you can also embed onto a website, at least if you have some sort of premium membership on there - I recently went for Gold, which is the least expensive) and I hope it might address the problem with the ChessBase replayer, which tends to have many levels of nested variations which can be hard to follow for some.  I note that Jonathan's blog 200 Open Games has been using the Chess.com replayer for a while.