Opening Prep

If I am writing a blog post this afternoon it is because I created myself a bit of extra free time by losing my round 2 game against Pascal (@Pascalg) in rapid and embarrassing fashion. It should take you all of two or three minutes to scroll through the nine moves of this debacle:

Black has fallen into a very simple opening trap. From the chess point of view, there is not actually much to learn here. 'Don't fall into traps' is as trite as it is useless as advice to take from this game. The real lesson was provided by Pascal in our post-game exchanges. He told me that he had looked at my games and seen that when I play the Caro-Kann against 1.e4 (which is virtually always nowadays) I avoid blocking in the c8 bishop with the move ...e6 and play it to g5 or f5 at the first opportunity and only then solidify the centre with ...e6. This is hardly surprising given that the whole point of the Caro-Kann is to solve the problem of the queen bishop's development. Pascal's observation was that I was applying this principle in an almost pathological fashion without regard to the concrete situation on the board. As part of my opening preparation I am always looking for simple rules like this that can be applied when I find myself in a variation that I do not know in detail. As with virtually every rule of this kind in chess though, this one is always safe to follow - except when it is not.

This simplistic approach to the opening meant that faced with a position that I was only vaguely familiar with after White's 7.Bb5 I could come up with nothing better than taking the bishop out to g4. This does not lose on the spot but does leave the bishop on a vulnerable square and White takes full advantage of this with their next move.

Full credit to Pascal who not only reviewed some of my games to identify what openings he might be facing but took the time to look for patterns that he might exploit. Having found my predilection for ...Bg4 he proceeded to look for variations in which this move is an error. This is a level of opening preparation that is impressive in itself but that also forces me to ask myself how Pascal can identify a weakness in my play that I have been completely ignorant of up until now. Clearly it is not possible to work on and correct problems that you can not define and name. To do this is going to require lots more work and work of quite a different quality than what I have been doing up till now.

A very salutary lesson Pascal. Merci.