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b4 (moving our second from left pawn up two spaces) is not a good move, but it is a funny one that people have trouble responding to. It opens up our queenside bishop to make plays while confusing the heck of the opponent.
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Jul 10, 2017 19:59
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 06:15 |
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Oh fine, e4 it up. But we will need my not-quite-supervilliany plans eventually. Mark my words!
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Jul 10, 2017 23:48
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Meanwhile, while we wait, I highly encourage the posting of chess memes.  
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Jul 11, 2017 00:08
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To continue on the standard line of play, exd5 (our pawn capturing theirs) is the best option.
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Jul 11, 2017 18:08
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Also, obviously I haven't read the Black thread as that would be haram, but black thread has way more posts than us. I find it unlikely that they are actually having super deep discussions, and even more unlikely that Fat Samurai's plan of posting a lot to show discussion is also being used by them, so I can only assume they are having a hecka cool and fun party or just can't get along at all. I hope it's the latter, but if it's the former, will the power of friendship manage to defeat our standardized openings?! Nah
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Jul 11, 2017 18:16
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Although, if I were to use the quick turnaround they had regarding move choice as evidence, they probably just posted about our several potential moves and therefore what they'd do in response, in effect having multiple votes. So they had a discussion for what if we e4'd, d4'd, c4'd, etc.
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Jul 11, 2017 18:24
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Faerie Fortune posted:A thought occurs to me, if this is such a standard opening then surely someone on their team knows how to counter it, right? Why not do something completely off the wall and unexpected to throw them off a whole bunch and get them confused about what our strategy might be, then take advantage while they scramble to figure out what the hell we're doing? That's what I was saying! But real answer, it's because this set of openings is advantageous to white if both teams play it perfectly. There will be time to diverge later after we move away from the easily wikipedia-searchable moves. In the meantime, why not just capture value where we can find it?
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Jul 11, 2017 18:30
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Here's a neat post on chess.com about this line if anyone is interested. Of particular note: quote:After 1. e4, the move 1... d5 is the 8th most played move in the Chess.com Master Games database. Out of the nearly 600,000 games beginning with 1. e4, only 2% of the games (almost 13,000 games) continues with 1... d5. In those games, white has scored roughly 43% wins, 30% draws and 27% losses.
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Jul 11, 2017 18:38
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Which is better than typical, just to be clear. Okay I'll shut up now.
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Jul 11, 2017 18:39
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Cloud Potato posted:Hurm. I'm not fond of just gobbling up stuff without any further plan, especially if it's just going to be taken by their Queen, and we've no strategy to take her in response You asked for a further plan, so here it is: It will be an even pawn trade and we can develop our board while chasing the queen to a poor spot with knight to c3. The best move they can make in response is queen to a5, which while not immediately touchable is also not doing a lot for black. The end result is that we can develop our board in a better way than our opponent through the gain into tempo. That's all if they make no mistakes.
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Jul 11, 2017 19:41
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Garbonix posted:I am for making them rush to protect their king so Bishop to b5 for check and even if they move out a pawn we can still take the pace from here. I mean only 4 of their pieces can block the check and if they use the knight for it we can take both the pawn and it in 2 turns, otherwise we move our knight out to protect what might take our bishop. This is actually incorrect, as moving our bishop in for check induces an immediate develop of pawn to c6. This will guaranteed put us behind on tempo as our only option will be to retreat with our bishop, essentially having wasted a turn while allowing the opponent to develop. Taking the pawn with our bishop results in that bishop being taken in turn and there's no other immediate method for keeping their king in check or regaining the lost material. Leaving our bishop where it is results in it being taken by the enemy pawn, and capturing that pawn because we moved knight to c3 leaves said knight with nowhere productive to go while still leaving us behind on material. Visualization of the result of this plan:  Covski posted:Since the issue has come up in all the threads: I will only call the vote early when a majority of all players on a team vote for the same move. This means 10 players out of a total of 18 on each team. Thanks! It's good as-is, I think.
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Jul 11, 2017 19:59
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I know I may sound like some big meanie trying to force a particular plan down our throats, but I want everyone to know that's it's nowhere near my goal to shoot down everyone else. It's just that these very early game stages are well studied by people much smarter than all of us put together, done so a thousand times over. Whilst demonstrating these lines, I hope I can also serve to educate everyone in the wonderful ways of chess. It's a glorious game with a lot of room for fantastic strategy that only really comes out when openings are solid from both sides. Otherwise it's a one-sided stomp and, to be frank, if there's going to be any stomping I'd like us to be the stompers.
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Jul 11, 2017 20:15
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Cloud Potato posted:Thanks for this post, I feel slightly better about exd5. Although, if this is Goon-speed hyper-aggressive chess, the more likely continuation would be Qe6+. That'd be even better, as that queen is easy for us to block while it prevents them from developing a key pawn.
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Jul 11, 2017 20:39
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Or if we want to get super aggressive, blocking with our queen and offering the trade probably puts us in the best position if they take it.
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Jul 11, 2017 20:42
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Actually I take that back, blocking with the bishop would be better in that position for us. Still, it's an incredibly awkward position that black would be putting themselves in, so I'm happy to bait as many "aggressive" moves that we can get our hands on.
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Jul 11, 2017 20:52
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 Let's see how the other team deals with this!
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Jul 11, 2017 22:35
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Added Space posted:Nc3, puts pressure on their queen and there's not a lot of good places to stash her afterward. This is correct. Dr. Fetus posted:Or if they ignore our bait entirely? Depends entirely on how they ignore it. The most common would be knight to f6, which leaves us open to making some dumb mistakes if we try to hold onto our pawn too hard (this can cause poor developments on our part), so the typically recommended response is pawn to d4, which gives up our pawn-up in exchange for a stronger position.
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Jul 11, 2017 23:15
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Added Space posted:They're goons. Do you honestly think they're going to do anything other then bash face-first into the problem? Maybe? My money goes more towards "goons bad" than "goons ultra-aggressive", I wouldn't doubt they could trick themselves into making a worse move.
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Jul 11, 2017 23:46
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Dr. Fetus posted:There are also people who know how to play chess in the other thread. The better players might spot the problem with sending their queen out this early. Unless they somehow have a super secret plan for that, but it would be too early in the game to start seeing that far ahead. Ignoring the queen bait is a real possibility. Well, even with the problems that sending the queen out has, it's still the best move that Black can make given the current position. Either they didn't foresee everything coming up to this point when they made their initial response and turned this game into the Scandinavian Defense, or they're hoping play progresses in a particular way due to exploiting group-consensus through non-obvious moves we'd need to make to win. All and all though, they're going to mess up eventually. We just have to not mess up first.
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Jul 11, 2017 23:55
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Twib posted:I'm glad Team White's been holding down the fort while I was off orienting for my first real job (wooo nursing). There's not much for me to add, but I'll just say that I'm extremely surprised to see that Black so gleefully sacrificed their own pawn for, well, absolutely nothing. I don't suppose one of you guys could guess why they made that particular move? They might have watched this video and are hoping to pull some of its sick tricks.
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Jul 12, 2017 00:29
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bman in 2288 posted:So now that we've taken their pawn, one of their options is to pull the queen out to try and stop us from rushing the king, right? But what if they move one of their pawns to either c6 or e6? Is that a move that we should consider them taking? What if they decide to go crazy and try to pull out their king? What if they try to move the rook into play before the queen, via pawn displacement? Typically speaking, when your pieces aren't in danger and you can't get some free captures or tempo, the answer is to develop your side of the board to put yourself in a better position in the future. For example, if our opponents waste their turn moving their king like you mentioned, we essentially ignore it until we can use it. It's the equivalent to our opponent tempo-ing their self.
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Jul 12, 2017 01:54
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oath2order posted:Assuming they take the bait we should could advance the pawns to threaten the queen. D2 to d3 and then C2 to C4 develop to board for us and force them to move their queen away. To do so would be to develop our pawn structure awkwardly over the course of two turns, making things much easier on black than if we simply move knight to c3 to attack their queen.
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Jul 12, 2017 02:20
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Dr. Fetus posted:How should pawns generally be handled at the beginning of the game in chess? Would you want to try to move them as such to prioritize some of your more important pieces being able to move out early on? That's a really generic question that I'm not certain how to answer, but I'll give it a shot. Control the center (having pieces on or attacking d4, e4, d5, and e5) (Leave room to) develop your knights and bishops Don't sacrifice pawns unless you have a plan Support your other pieces I think this article on chess strategy can impart sounder wisdom than myself, however. To be more specific to this opening (Scandinavian Defense), the major advantage to White is that it often develops to allow us to castle queen-side (the long castle). To move our pawns as oath2order suggests would remove this advantage by not developing our queen-side knight immediately whilst also making our queen side pawn structure more open to attack. Emmideer fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Jul 12, 2017 |
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Jul 12, 2017 02:41
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Now, if you did want to move our pawns to eventually attack the queen, the better play would be Knight to f3. It doesn't immediately do anything against the queen, but is a solid development and eventually leads to us being able to go d4 and c4 which is a much stronger position. You can find the details in this video, although I personally think that it's not as great as some of the traps we can set with the traditional knight to c3, which also serves to demoralize our opponents if they didn't plan everything out.
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Jul 12, 2017 03:11
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bman in 2288 posted:I think demoralizing would work an interesting way here: it might split the vote on their side, and they might pick a weird move we can capitalize on. But demoralizing as it works on one person may not work the same way against a large group of them. Yes, both the knight movements of c3 and f3 are perfectly playable. I just mentioned the demoralizing thing offhand; it's not the reason for any particular move, the moves are solid on their own.
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Jul 12, 2017 04:15
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Here are some other cool Scandinavian videos I've been referring to for this game: Bobby Fischer wrecking. Some nerdy guy who gives good explanations. Really basic video for really basic folks. This video gives me a headache due to the poor audio quality, but the content is good! I don't expect most of you to actually watch these, but I'll try to summarize and refer back to them when and if relevant.
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Jul 12, 2017 04:20
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d4 is the correct move here, and here's why (references the videos I posted earlier); It develops a piece to the center, which is always a good move. One might think "Ah, we are sacrificing a pawn for tempo when they capture with their knight. Is that worth it?" To which the answer is "Yes, absolutely!" You see, we're already up a pawn. Once our opponent moves to capture our pawn on d5 with their knight, we move our pawn to c4 on the next move, threatening the knight. We gain extra tempo from this, as they will be forced to move their knight for the third time in the game. That's really bad for Black! There are some fork attacks Black can attempt on us as a result of this line, but I am aware of them from the videos so they will not actually be successful. Black will waste their time. Black will waste their pieces. And when Black has defeated themselves, we will be victorious. Let Black defeat their selves and go d4!
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Jul 12, 2017 15:45
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Here is a timestamped video explaining more in-depth why this particular response of ours is best.
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Jul 12, 2017 15:52
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Specifically, our opponents are playing a line known as the Modern Scandinavian Gambit; gambits are a specific term in chess, called such because they sacrifice pawns in an attempt to gain tempo. If we wanted to accept this gambit, we would protect our pawn with a pawn of our own. The end result would lead to a board where Black is down a pawn, but has significantly better board position than us. Declining the gambit through d4 removes our pawn advantage, but grants us the tempo instead.
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Jul 12, 2017 16:27
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I may have confused some things there for anyone who actually knows chess super in-depth, my apologies. We don't actually know if our opponent are going to go the specific Modern Scandinavian Gambit video I posted, but I have a feeling. The gambit we are specifically declining with d4 is the Icelandic Gambit, because accepting said gambit tends to be good for Black.
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Jul 12, 2017 16:37
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Now something worth mentioning, mentioned by another video I watched, is the possibility of playing Bishop to b5 in this position, which puts the opponent in check. This was also mentioned in a post by Dr. Fetus:Dr. Fetus posted:That might look good on paper, forcing a Bishop or a Queen to come out, but they could also just block that by moving their C7 Pawn to C6. And then both our Bishop and Pawn would be in danger unless we can somehow capitalize on that move. Now, our opponent's worse move in response is actually the movement of their pawn to c6. We capture, they recapture, and then we need to move back our bishop only one space to c4, an excellent position to be in with no choice of counter attack. This is actually much stronger than the traditional d4 if the opponents make this mistake. The proper response to us moving bishop to b5 is blocking by moving their knight to b7. Our bishop gets to hang out their for a turn whilst we make a standard develop like knight to f3, but will soon be kicked off by a6, a great tempo play for black. So the main upside to this move is it baits our opponent into a not-so-obvious mistake that leaves our board in a great position while still being a pawn up. The main downside, beside the possibility that the play it correctly, is after this execution of moves we are 100% out of runway in terms of play I can easily google for us (though, counter-point, same goes for our opponent and also you guys might want to start doing things off-the-book). I'm still personally rooting for d4, but I have absolutely no problem with the move of bishop to b5 check.
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Jul 12, 2017 18:09
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Fat Samurai posted:Not defending our forward pawn means they will probably take it with either Knight or Queen. We can counter that with either c4 or Kc4, respectively, which they cannot take. That forces them to either move back (so lose a turn, meanwhile we keep control of the middle of the board) or charge forward unsupported, which is all kinds of bad idea, specially for the Queen. One thing to mention on this if they choose to capture with their queen after we play d4 is that an immediate Kc4 is not the ideal move; it's not a bad one, but we'd preferably like to support our pawn with Kf3, make a play with our kingside bishop to somewhere better, castle, and then finally c4 to attack the queen. The result is much stronger board position that, while delaying the tempo gain on the queen, does not by any means give it up even if Black responds perfectly.
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Jul 12, 2017 18:14
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Fat Samurai posted:
Desiring to play fast and loose aside, there's no reason their not-under-attack queen wouldn't hang around. To do otherwise would be to tempo their selves without us having to commit a move forcing them to, which is even better for us.
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Jul 12, 2017 18:20
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Primarily I'm hoping that after we d4, our opponents attempts the Portuguese gambit which involves them moving their bishop to g4. Now you may think our natural development their would be our pawn to block the attack on our queen while attacking the bishop, but this is a mistake much in the same way a pawn play is a mistake by our opponent if we were to play our own bishop deep into enemy lines. After our opponent backs off to f5 we're looking at a board where we need to commit to defending our pawn at d5 by playing c4, which leads to a game where we are primarily developing pawns and our opponent is styling with a bunch of cool knights and bishops. It's not the worst thing to happen, but is very annoying and makes for an extremely unbalanced board that can be difficult to analyze. The proper response is knight to f3, blocking the bishop. This gives us breathing room to develop our board in other ways, for example attacking the bishop with pawn to h3.
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Jul 12, 2017 18:31
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Added Space posted:
To reiterate earlier, while this state is very good, it only proceeds if black makes the mistake of capturing the bishop with their pawn rather than blocking it with their knight. Blocking with their own bishop is also fine for them, though not as good as blocking with their knight.
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Jul 12, 2017 20:50
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Added Space posted:If they advance their knight we capture it with our bishop. A bishop for a knight is a good trade. Sorry, but that's backwards; bishops are worth slightly more than a knight, especially at these early stages of the game. Not to mention that capturing the knight leads to a counter-capture using their bishop or queen, offering a free development that will naturally develop into a queen-side castle.
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Jul 12, 2017 20:54
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I'm really looking forward to the sequel, Goons play Texas Hold'em.
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Jul 12, 2017 21:45
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Cloud Potato posted:Another thing to consider: they didn't take the unsupported pawn with their queen, so perhaps our interpretation of Goon-style hyper-aggressive chess was way off. And there's no guarantee that they'll even take the d5 pawn. How would we respond to Ne4? And then Nf2 If they go Knight e4, we move pawn f3 and then if they go knight f2, we capture it with our king and are extremely super happy that our opponents are downright terrible.
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Jul 12, 2017 22:12
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Though honestly, bishop d3 would be the better immediate response to some bizarre play like Knight e4; only idiots would then go for our f2 pawn, the more likely result is that they'd retreat to f6 where they started.
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Jul 12, 2017 22:15
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 06:15 |
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Actually I take that back a second time, they may be looking to support that awkward move with a bishop to f5 if we tried to play out our own bishop, so the pawn is best to prevent that. tbh though it's not worth thinking out in advance "what if our opponent made this terrible nonsense play?"
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Jul 12, 2017 22:20
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