Da Da Da

In honor of the 30th anniversary...if you don't remember this, well, here it is:



A translation of the chorus for the less German-proficient reader:

Ich liebe dich nicht, du liebst mich nicht
"I do not love you, you do not love me," or something like that. 

Note the utter simplicity of the arrangement, the clever internal rhyme...there is more here than the surface. Or perhaps less. Life is still a Mystery.

Best of Chess Blogging Part III: What a Wonderful World

And now, Part III of the Best of Chess Blogging! This incorporates everything that has been submitted that I didn't get into Part I and Part II. If I have missed someone's submission please let me know and I'll get it added.

I suggest for maximum enjoyment you play the song below and open the links in new tabs...it really is a wonderful world, that has such people in't!


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For instance, GM Nigel Davies. Love his books and his blog, The Chess Improver.
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Intermezzo from Hebden Bridge nominated:

Best Blog, Best Moves!
"I simply can't see past Tim Krabbe's amazing "Chess Curiosities". It's the benchmark for any chess blog in my view and his 101 Greatest Chess Moves is still the daddy!"

"From the Hebden Bridge Chess Club site and my own blog I would pick the following:

Most Popular Post
Statistically our best ever post was Lenin vs Hitler: Who Won? This post has spawned a series of spin offs and I was recently amazed to find that the game featured in this post has been put on You Tube badged as the genuine article. The internet is a wonderful place!

Favorite Post
I wish I could always produce posts like this one about visualization Don't Look Now with interesting content gathered from across the internet and served up with my own perspective. Sadly time rarely permits such strenuous efforts!

Best Game
Not many candidates here! I still have a spot for this ancient game. I've certainly not played many better in the intervening years. Bit of a sad indictment really." (make sure and check this game out, it's a blast! RP)
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Fabror the Guru: "I would like to contribute in my humble ways": The Act of Learning


Tommyg's tournament coffee cup


Tommyg of The Prodigal Pawn is an expert musician and teacher, and he got that way the same way one gets better at chess. PRACTICE! So we appreciate his perspective on chess improvement, as in Chess: A Fresh Perspective

He also came through with:
The difference between Practicing Chess Tactics and Practicing the Application of Chess Tactics, some software reviews and the WORST advice I ever received about chess openings!



"And without a doubt one of my favorite games I have ever played": Another ICC Win!! A Lesson Learned from Capablanca!
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NM Dana (Mackenzie) Blogs Chess submitted as his best posts: Jerry Hanken on Reshevsky vs. Fischer, "A little-known piece of chess history from the Fischer-Reshevsky match, which I heard from Jerry Hanken."

Pruess Parties Like It's 1899, "A great game from IM David Pruess, played in true 1800s style."

Maris'd "I get my Life Master certificate, but I find out that it comes with an asterisk."

Who Loves Chess the Most? "Sort of an homage to a very common chess player who has nevertheless done something quite uncommon -- he has quite possibly lost more games than anyone else in the USCF."
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Yes, as a matter of fact I am "obsessed by chess."

SonofPearl suggested as his "better efforts":

A recent book review of Frank Brady's new Bobby Fischer biography.

"Some of my pet niggles came out in 10 Ways You Look Like A Chess Newbie" (A wonderful piece! RP)

"My improvement tips for other lazy players like me," 8 Shortcuts To Chess Improvement 

"Lastly, a lighthearted a not terribly serious quiz," Are You Obsessed By Chess? 

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Broken Pawn, let us note, won the 2011 Chess Journalists Award for "Best Blog." Hank Anzis, Prop., gives us his best:

Give the kid a prize!

The beast in me

A fair Iowa State Fair

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NM James R. West sent in (and he would know!): The best chess move I have ever played!

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Blue Devil Knight - "My three best, in my opinion, are":

The social dimension of chess improvement (a very important point!)

When and how much to analyze

Lessons from blitz (don't skip the interesting comments)

BDK deserves much more, and he provided it by his big post Blog Highlights way back in 2007. You'll note that by that date he had already done a LOT of thinking and writing about chess improvement. Also, he kept alive the Chess Blogging Carnival for 2011.

BDK just before the final round

Thank you, BDK!

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Adventures of Rabin (NM) gave us as his five favorites:

Chess Adventures in Vietnam (published by the USCF)

Chess Struggles in Amish Land (Sturbridge torunament)

Boylston Quads Today

Liberty Bell Open/Back to Brandeis

National Chess Day (Boylston Chess Club Piece)
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Rolling Pawns - "Here is my contribution":

Playing Home Game

Actually, Rolling Pawns has published many, many interesting games on his site and you should look some more of them over.
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James Stripes in an earlier career.



Chess Skills by James Stripes - James writes, "I'm fond of Pillsbury's Mate (a piece of history that Edward Winter found worthy of mention is his notes)."

Chessmaster vs. Fritz: Analysis ("a clear comparison of the analysis features of two popular computer programs").

Chess on the iPad ("my most popular post: over 12,000 page views")

Best of the Best: Chess Informant Reader's Contest ("my list of the ten best games since 1966--submitted in a contest that won me $800 worth of CI disks")
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Five sites well worth your perusal whose authors didn't submit any particular posts (or perhaps never heard of this madness:

Steve Giddins' Chess Blog
 
Katar

From Patzer to Master


The Awsomeness that is Blunderprone! (See his sidebar "popular posts" for a start)

Brooklyn 64
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I originally found Mark Weeks as the chess guy at about.com. He used to do a monthly blog digest there and was kind enough to link this blog several times and that really helped increase readership. In 2008, for whatever reason, Mark and that site parted company and he began blogging at Chess For All Ages. If I may say, about.com blew it! He also does the World Chess Championship Blog and Chess960 (FRC). Mark has spent quite a bit of time archiving his hundreds of articles from About here.

As far as his blogs go, he chose for this collection to gather the three  posts from his three blogs and link them at My Most Popular Posts. You, the reader, can take it from there. Mark Weeks has produced enough quality chess reading to fill several books and I hope you enjoy just browsing around his sites.

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Can Anybody Translate This?

Michael Goeller commented, "Well, since you said you were doing classic chess blogs since the beginning of chess blogging, I thought I'd put some together for you and your readers. This is, unfortunately, nowhere near a complete survey, which would be nice to compile but I do have a job and a family and my own blogging addiction to take care of":

Chess Is Fun by Jon Edwards. "This was the first real chess blog, and a model of usability and helpfulness to readers. My favorite posts are those that provide a brief book review, a well annotated game from the book, and -- just in case that were not enough for you -- a complete collection of games from the book! There are lots of great games on the White side of the Najdorf Sicilian, but I focused on some other stuff that interested me. You and your readers should really explore this site."

(NOTE: The pages below each have TONS of good stuff. I have just given a few highlights.)
April 30, 2004 Double Rook Sacs, Art of Attack in Chess, Super Nez, etc.
March 31, 2004 Instructive Modern Chess Masterpieces, Jon Speelman's Best Games, Bogojno Tournament etc.

The Boylston Chess Club Weblog "This was the first major weblog and it did a lot to promote a chess blogging community. Here are some interesting posts, both modern and classic":

Hnefatafl, an ancient Viking board game, revived

Tilting at Windmills 

A Remarkably Successful Failure 

Measuring the Chess Blogosphere

Knights to some, de la Mazans to others

GM Kevin Spraggett "So good to see a GM chess blogger out there. Besides the lovely ladies, and the jokes, and the attacks on the Canadian Chess Federation, what I appreciate most are the annotated games (current and classic) and the quizzes. The quizzes most of all":

Today's Winning Chess Quiz

Another Chess Quiz (Frank Marshall)

Liz Vicary (Knows ALL!)

Her interviews with the USCL players were interesting and well received:

USCL Commissioner IM Greg Shahade
GM Larry Christiansen

She's a very successful coach: Pictures of her students.

"The Chess Mind One of the first and the best. Unfortunately, Dennis has had to move the blog twice, and one former blog (which had some of his best content) is now completely gone from the web. A terrible loss. His more recent work is solid, but more directed at analyzing the current games than engaging in the sort of things you generally look for in blogs. His analysis of the World Championship games was great":

Topalov Wins Game 1 (World Championship Match vs. Anand 2010)
Game 12 (live coverage)
Game 12 (with notes...)

Karpov vs. Spassky on Television, 1982

Marsh Towers: "His reviews really took off around 2008. However, the quality necessarily dropped a bit, as he often had to review several works in each piece. The past couple years, it has been mostly about music."

Here is a sample of the Marsh Tower book reviews.

"Someone else will have to add The Daily Dirt and The Streatham and Brixton Chess Blog which also deserve attention.

"As for my work, I would add my series on The Panther, which is my all time favorite even if it never got a lot of attention."

It should Michael, it should. Thank you very, very much for all of these great additions!
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One more site I am going to highly recommend again, is Edward Winter's Chess Notes. If you enjoy chess history and accurate information about players, tournaments and games, this is the place to spend some time. I have recently found several gems to blog about, look for that in the near future!

This concludes The Best Of! Chess Blogging series, excepting any errata or submissions that were overlooked (if so, apologies in advance). It has been laborious but lovely. Enjoy, and please comment and link at your site!

Big, BIG Best of Chess Blogging Post Almost Done

Part I on Openings was here. Part II.

Part III will be done in a couple of days. It is large, as befits the final summation of very heights of the mammoth field of chess blogging.

Here's something wonderful to keep you happy until then:

Killing Floor

The lyrics of this song remind me of the Goddess Caissa...we always come back, don't we? Relevant to chess, agree or disagree?

Musical Interlude

This rocks so hard it will shake the very foundations of your weltanschauung. Seriously, as a cello player myself (admittedly, mostly inactive since high school) I can't tell you how proud I am to share this with you:

2Cellos, "Welcome to the Jungle"

Tommyg Rocks the World

The Prodigal Pawn lists his Top 15 Rock and Roll Albums of All Time!

I smell contoversy in the water!

Okay, his is a great list of great music for sure, and as he notes, these "greatest" lists are always going to be very personal.

Here are a few things I would note: There are really 17 albums (good one, Tommy!). There's nothing that was released after 2001 (the Radiohead) so I wonder if Rock is Dead? To be honest, that's about when I stopped keeping up with the pop music scene myself, and I don't have any suggestions for after that without an internet search of some kind. All my picks are from around or before that time too!

A few suggestions for additions to Tommy's list (I wouldn't dream of replacing anything):

System of a Down, Toxicity (2001)

I well remember seeing the video for the title song at a friend's house, having no idea who these guys were, and just being completely blown away. Completely. This album has more drive than a Ferrari and more intelligence than 99% of rock!

Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blood Sugar Sex Magik (1991)

A magikal mix of killer musicianship, energy and styles.

Rolling Stones, Some Girls (1978)

Tommy, Tommy, Tommyg, how did you make a list without the Stones, man? This is the album that made the Stones relvant, after they threatened to become a bunch of jaded rock 'n' roll zillionaires. It also contains my all-time favorite song of theirs, "When the Whip Comes Down."

Queen, A Night at the Opera (1975)

To my mind, this group had some of the best musicians on the planet, and it was tough to chose just one album. The greatness for me is the ability of the band to nail multiple styles of music and produce an album that is a unified whole, not just great collection of songs.

There's my take--what say you, Rock and Roll Reader (yeah I know we got off the chess theme here, so sue me).

Junior Walker and the All-Stars: "Shoot Your Shot"

I defy you to try and sit still while this plays:

Another Song to Express the Inner Me: Sunday Morning Coming Down

As I noted yesterday in my Thin Lizzy post, your favorite music can say a lot about who you are.  Here's another piece that resonates strongly with me.  I may be a tough-minded, hard-hearted conservative libertarian but my eyes are always teary by the end of this one.

There is No Substitute for Victory

The Goddess, Victoria.

Per my friend (whom I do not personally know) Mencius Moldbug:

Therefore, in many cases peace can be achieved only in the Roman way: by victory. As with all military objectives, victory is achieved by any means necessary. Including artillery. Clearly, if the enemy uses artillery and you don't, your chances of victory are greatly reduced.

Carve this on your forehead:  The only reason for a Decline and Fall, of an empire or a chess player, is erosion of the Will.

The Kinks also knew--there was no substitute for Victoria.



Ponder this lesson deeply, Grasshopper

Chess Amateurs, Chess Pros, When and If the Twain Shall Meet

Mark Weeks of Chess for All Ages kindly posts a thoughtful and extended answer, Do You Care About Today's GMs? to my previous post on this question.  In the comments to Mark's post Michael Goeller, the most excellent Kenilworthian recalls his take on the question, Chess Amateurism, from a couple of years ago.

Mark also makes a point in his post about the openings being "exhausted" at some point in the next 10-20 years. He is becoming more and more interested in chess960 as a result.  I figure that even when chess (not just the opening) is "solved" in the way checkers is now solved, there will still be plenty of space for fallible humans to enjoy playing each other.  Whether there will still be a demand for grandmasters to get paid to play each other at that time is another matter.

I really appreciated the many cogent comments to that post, but especially this one:

Hardly knowing anything of chess, I hardly know of any of today's GMs, much less their games.
 

I am, as in most things, interested in the antiquated.

That's Aaron DeWeese, and you may want to take a look at his his fascinating Nether Letter Log.  I'm with Aaron, love me some antiquated chess; probably, I'll still be saying that when they download my whole brain content into a hard drive and send it on a trip to the stars in a self-replicating space exploration machine.  Of course, the Really Big Database will be available for review, and it'll be something like the Star Trek TNG Holodeck.  I'll spend part of the time playing a match with the Ghost (in the machine) of Tarrasch.  Neither of us will have computer assistance.

Remember, the purpose of philosophy is to screw the inscrutable (or, alternatively, to eff the ineffable).

For a change today, let's NOT ROCK, let's be COOL:

Do You Care About Today's Grandmaster Games and Tournaments?

Over at IM Mark Ginsburg's blog I was moved to comment on his post The New Chess, "When young grandmasters whip out crazy theory backed by millions of pre-game CPU cycles."

Just as a personal impression and certainly not from some scientific poll, I think this kind of chess has led to some loss of interest by today's amateurs in current grandmaster games.  I commented in part:

My impression reading the chess proletariat’s blogs and talking to U-1800s at tournaments and clubs is that a lot of them just don’t care that much about GM chess these days. Sure, they look at the Corus results and sometimes follow on ICC but but games like the above, how does this help me whip Jones for the club class B championship? There are still beautiful tactics and interesting chess involved here, to be sure, but the masses increasingly don’t care about innovations at move 17 or 25, even compared to 20 years ago in the Kasparov era. We can study Tarrasch or Zurich 1953 or even 60 Memorable Games and get more out of it, in a purely practical sense.

I’m sure ambitious 10-year-olds are also studying this game, but my purely unscientific sample says that the over-teenage, under-2200 crowd spends a lot less time at the club discussing the latest GM games than when I started going to clubs around 1980.

So, for any reader who has been around serious chess long enough to have seen the beginning of the computer era, what say you?  Do you look at yesterday's Wijk aan Zee games with annotations by the excellent Dennis Monokroussos, or was it on your radar at all?  If you were around for both, were you more likely to look at the games from Karpov-Kasparov 1985 than Anand-Kramnik 2008?

While you think about it, LET US ROCK!

ACIS 2010 Update

Well, two weeks have pased since my first personal ACIS post, and finally a progress report; so far I have made it through through p. 34 of Silman's How to Reassess Your Chess (3d. ed.)--the introductory material, the "basic endgames" and the first substantive chapter, "Thinking Techniques."  While I was pretty familiar with the pawn and rook+pawn endings which are the bulk of the endgame chapters, it did me good to study it again, plus, I did pick up one valuable shortcut that somehow I had never explicitly seen (or it hadn't registered), that when the kings are far apart and you're trying to get the "distant opposition," as Silman states, move the king to a square or rectangle in which each corner is the same color.  While I had an idea of what the "distant opposition" is, this simple mnenomic will now be with me forever!  Here is the example:

White needs to go Kb2 to keep the distant opposition.  Even though Kc1 stays on the same color square as Black's king, it loses the opposition--note that the "corner" colors are different.

Besides this nugget, the best thing about the first chapters was getting back into really looking deeply into a few positions, getting back into the groove of taking apart a chess position in great detail.

It struck that Silman's book might have been titled My System after Nimzovich's, except that Silman assumes a certain level of familiarity with positional concepts like space, and doesn't go through what Nimzovich called "The Elements" first.  Reassess Your Chess is not for the true beginner, and I think it is telling that in the introduction Silman gives the example of an adult player who has made it to Expert (2000 Elo), but is stuck there, as who the book is aimed at.

Some Cool Links

Speaking of My System, Temposchlucker has posted his take, My System Redux.  His understanding and admiration have grown.

My friend and fierce opponent Vernon Young, who I managed to edge out for 2008 Reno Class B Champion, has started an intriguing, stimulating and eclectic blog about chess and other things at Vernon R Young's Blog.  You will note that since my two victories against him in that tournament he has shot ahead about 180 rating points.  And he makes chess videos!  Very cool, Vernon.

Blunderprone has yet another outstanding tournament series, Lone Pine 1975.  Look, Jeremy Silman!  Also, Part II is must read!

Thanks to these outstanding bloggers, and all the rest who post entertaining and valuable material as a labor of love.

And now, LET US ROCK!

ACIS of Caissa: Maybe It's Not What to Study, It's Whether We Need to Study at All?

The ACIS (Adult Chess Improvement Seekers) seems to have really taken off, from its modest beginning in some comments at Chess Confessions, through its modest viral development by Blunder Prone (part II, part III), and a cascade of Seekers.

(Mr. Duval aka Blunder Prone has a list on the top of his sidebar. More are to follow, I'm sure)

A.C.I.S of Caissa (so far)

• Back rank (Loomis)
• Banatt
• Blue Devil Knight
• Chess Tiger ( new and improved!)
• Chunky Rook
• Getting to 2000
• Harvey!
• Linuxguy
• Steve Learns Chess ( Mr. Eddins)
• Tacticus Maximus
• TempoSchlucker
• Wahrheit
• Wang's World
• You Are Here (BP)

Now that we have a title, a mission, a movement, so to speak, I would like to present the theoretical underpinnings of ACIS as I understand them, to make it more than just another acronym. I don't speak for anyone else, but look forward to hearing from you, Dear Reader, regarding whether I've captured some thing of value here.

Much of the chess blogging by non-professionals is about improvement. Certainly, there are history blogs, Grandmaster blogs, club blogs, etc., but even these sometimes touch on improvement. Scrolling down the list of blogs I've chosen to link to on the sidebar, the majority of posts on a majority of the sites are about general or personal chess improvement. The original Knights de la Maza were, of course chiefly about improvement using a certain, defined method as defined in de la Maza's articles (Part I, Part II) and book.

Very few of these thousands of chess improvement posts seem to ask the questions:

Why do you need to improve? Why do you want to improve? And how, exactly, is this improvement to be defined?

Let's go back even farther. Let's go back to First Principles. Why the hell do we play chess at all? That's worth an essay in itself, and people have already written it: Concentration, competition, achievement, healthy struggle; given that we do play, why try so hard to improve? I've referred back to my posts about Dr. Kenneth Mark Colby many times and I'll do so again:

Why should a patzer seek to become a grandpatzer? Because of the aristos (Greek: Aristos = best). Life is more than ham sandwiches and beer. Humans strive, not just to survive, but to enhance the quality, the excellence, of survival. Striving for excellence in any endeavor, developing yourself to become your best at what you do, is rewarding and fulfilling to aspirations higher than happiness. Merely happy people, without artistic goals, vegetate in incomplete, hobbled and impoverished lives...A grandpatzer is a strong chessplayer, a threat to anyone (including himself) in a given game.

Very philosophical, no? There is however, another take, another approach that one could find just as legitimate, indeed, more practical:

"Anything worth doing, is worth doing badly."

---G. K. Chesterton

"Right now, I’m 1600-ish, the same as 10 years ago without putting effort into improvement. What would happen if I tried? Does the thought of “maybe there’s an Expert somewhere in here” motivate me enough to work?

More likely, the “I’m sufficiently skilled so most people can’t dismiss me; that’s good enough” win out (again)."

---Donnie, Liquid Egg Product

Let me state it this way: One could just play chess. In the days of yore, the olden days when there was smoking in chess clubs and all kind of dangerous stuff like that, quite a few people became experts or masters just by playing a lot of chess at a club with strong players. Reuben Fine, for example, had the best Americans of the 1920s and '30s New York chess clubs to school him, and played a great deal of blitz as a youngster. I believe he once wrote that he did very little formal study before reaching master level. So just as a base, using your chess time to play chess will bring you to certain level, your natural level of chess skill, so to speak.

After that, it gets murky.

"Improvement" is almost universally defined by us in the ACIS/chess blogging community as an improved rating, whether USCF, FIDE, ICC or other. Whether a higher rating is all we really should be striving for in our chess career is something well worth exploring, but I want to save that for another post. Let's accept that as given, for now. The big question (drum roll, please...)

Is studying chess really the best way to raise your rating???

I'm going to give you a few questions to ponder. Have you ever been kibbitzing a game and seen good moves that the players (sometimes much higher-rated than you) missed? Have you ever played a move in a (non-blitz) game and instantly seen, as soon as you took your hand off the piece, that it was a blunder? Have you ever seen a Grandmaster blunder? (if not, see my "Homer Nods" series). I'll wager a bundle you answered "Yes, yes and yes."

Have you ever asked yourself how these things are possible?

If you are a person who has played a reasonable amount of serious chess, "lost at least 500 games" as Capablanca is said to have formulated it, you already know enough about tactics to avoid major blunders, and to take tactical advantage of your opponents' mistakes. You already know that "Loose pieces drop off" and the pattern of a knight fork and a back-rank mate.

So, why do you, (and me too!) still make these kinds of mistakes, mistakes that are usually the main reason that our rating is static? Why can't we call up this knowledge on (almost) every move and avoid blunders and climb the ladder to the rating we so richly deserve? Why do tactical exercises, even thousands of them, sometimes help, but often in a very limited way--that is, why have some people done 10,000 or more of them and not become masters?

Questions, questions...these are questions for human performance psychology, rather than arguments about whether MDLM is the best study method. And like a good old-fashioned movie serial, for now I'll leave you hanging. In the next installment, we'll survey the field and see what we can glean that will help us ACISers out.

Until then, let us ROCK

Favorites (I)

In the comments to my last post, welcoming him back, Tommyg writes:

By the way I noticed in your profile under favorite music that you had AC/DC and Sinatra back to back! LOVE THAT!

That's one of the things I like about Tommyg, he gets it. So many people figure that if you like AC/DC you can like, say, Aerosmith, but you can't like, say, Beethoven.

WRONG.

I love Beethoven, especially the Ninth Symphony, especially the fourth movement, especially the part where the deep-voiced guy breaks into the German...a translation for ya:

Joy, beautiful spark of the gods,
Daughter of Elysium,
We enter fire imbibed,
Heavenly, thy sanctuary.

Be embraced, Millions!
This kiss for all the world!
Brothers!, above the starry canopy
A loving father must dwell.

I also love the music of the Rolling Stones, especially the album Some Girls, especially this song, especially this live version of this song at that moment, the best live version, given the circumstances, that will ever be:

Rolling Stones - When the whip comes down

Why? For the reason everyone loves certain art; it is sympathy...

Test Driving the Caro-Kann

Like most serious chess players I've tried out a number of different openings over the years, for a number of different reasons; educational purposes, competitive surprise, because I bought the book, even at times just because I wanted some variety.

For tournament games, in response to 1. e4 I went e5 at the beginning of my career in the early 1980s, tried the French Defense (1. e4 e6) a few times with a lot of suffering involved, back to 1... e5, a mixture of Sicilians (1. e4 c5) and the Pirc/Modern (1. e4 d6) for much of the 1990s and early 2000s, then about four years ago started working with the Center-Counter (Scandinavian) 1. e4 d5, which I have played pretty consistently since.

Notice the one main defense that's not listed? That's right, the Caro-Kann (1. e4 c6).

Why not the C-K? Hmm, before reading further you need to click this link...

Now that doesn't represent my real feelings about the Caro-Kann defense, but it's funny, I think I did play it exactly once in all my tournament career, and lost to Darcy Robinson. One loss did not completely determine my attitude toward the C-K, but generally I saw it as passive and somewhat dull. Botvinnik took it up in his later years, when he was old. A pretty consistent King's Indian Defense man against 1. d4 since my early days, I just always figured the Caro didn't suit my supposed style.

A few months ago I gave it a try in some blitz games, mainly for the variety factor mentioned above. I don't even have the one book I own on this opening available (in storage until early May) and so after the first few moves I was basically on my own, just making stuff up, developing pieces and trying to control the center. And guess what? I did fine. I scored pretty well, and the games didn't seem dull in any way. Of course it was blitz, where there's rarely a dull moment, but I began to think the C-K is OK!

After a brief period it occurred to me (I'm sure this is hardly an original insight) that the Caro-Kann is just an improved Center-Counter! WOW! I don't know why I never noticed it as a dedicated Center-Counter practitioner, but after 1. e4 c6 Black can play d5 on move two against anything, and maintain his full and fair share of the center.

So after all these years (going on 27 of tournament play) I finally have some appreciation for the Caro-Kann. Once I actually start learning some book lines, who knows how far it might take me?

Want to be taken somewhere else? Take the "A" Train. But make sure you have the full 9:26 available. This is just magical stuff (h/t Jaltcoh):