Thursday, April 20, 2006

Better Anti-Danish Line

Dennis Monokroussos (The Chess Mind) has some good commentary on Karsten Müller's Danish Gambit analysis, mentioned here yesterday. Today he offers a reader's interesting suggestion of 1.e4 e5 2.d4 exd4 3.c3 Ne7!? followed by ...d5 as a much easier way of meeting White's d4-gambits than the complicated and rather drawish Capablanca Defense. The 3...Ne7 line is endorsed by John Watson in his book (with Eric Schiller) "Surviving and Beating Annoying Openings," as he mentions in his review of Danish Dynamite and discusses at some length on the second page of that commentary. I have also posted a quickly compiled PGN file you can download, featuring two great wins by Johnny Hector (one of my "opening heroes") with this rather rare variation. Judging by the games, it seems to work much better against the Danish move order than against the Goring (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 exd4 4.c3 Nge7!?) where White has a good winning percentage.

Update: the conversation continues today at The Chess Mind.

1 comment:

Friend of Plato said...

This is good stuff. Iused to play the Danish alot and still have to face it at times. I also really like the fighting games Johnny Hector.