A BREEZE IN THE SLEEPY 4-KNIGHT'S GAME

A Guided Tour of Chess - The Chess Cafe, March 2000

In one of my very first games at ICC, in fact when it was still ICS, a certain Blokje played the following against me: Blokje - Platypussy, ICS 2 12 blitz, 1995: 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Nc3 Nf6 (See Diagram) 4.Nxe5 This irritated me. I vaguely knew about this move - not as a real opening, but as some sort of a student's joke, something silly that might be played at the end of a long blitz-and-boozing session. Wasn't this the 'Irish Gambit', the one with the anecdote where they asked the inventor on his death bed how he had thought of it, and he had answered: 'I didn't see it was protected'? The typically Dutch dimunitive suggested Mr. Blokje was a compatriot - so what was this: Dutch bragging?

Anyway, the game continued 4...Nxe5 5.d4 Nc6 6.d5 Ne5 7.f4 Ng6 8.e5 Ng8 9.Bd3 Bb4 10.O-O Bxc3 11.bxc3 d6 12.e6 fxe6 13.dxe6 Nf6 14.g4 O-O 15.g5 Ne8 16.f5 Ne5 17.Re1 Nxd3?? 18.e7 and a little later I resigned.

I was convinced I had only lost because of the aggravation, and I remembered this game (and the other two where 4.Nxe5 had been played against me at ICC, and which I had both lost in 14 moves) when not too long ago, there was a discussion on rec.games.chess.misc about whether it is impolite for Black to answer 1.e4 with 1...a6.

The idea that an opening can be impolite is interesting. You immediately wonder if there are equivalents in other sports. The underhand service in tennis comes to mind (the Chang Variation), the break-away at the start of a bicycle race, the goalkeeper taking a penalty kick in soccer. They are demonstrations, not dangerous for the opponents, but they do disturb the normal course of events, and the irritation they cause favors the impolite.

In Internet-blitz, it turned out, there are Whites who, if they don't care about their ratings, immediately resign after 1...a6 because it keeps them from practicing their repertoire. But an underhand service is not in itself losing, and neither is 1...a6. Miles played it in a famous game against Karpov, and won. I've published that game with a question mark for a6 - a question mark for bad manners. Karpov was the reigning World Champion - you don't order pizza when you have the King over for dinner. Karpov's loss in that game must have been partly due to his irritation over 1...a6.



When I decided to write something about 'impolite openings' for my Dutch newspaper column, it was going to be about 1...a6 and 1...g5 and the like, but I also added something about this 4.Nxe5.

In fact, I did know 4.Nxe5 existed, and even had a name: the 'Müller-Schulze Gambit'. (Irish Gambit, Chicago Gambit or Razzle Dazzle Gambit are names for an even more nonsensical opening: 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Nxe5). 'Müller - Schulze Gambit' is mockery; in German, 'Müller and Schulze' (sometimes 'Meier, Müller, Schulze and Schmidt') stands for 'everybody', comparable to 'Tom, Dick and Harry' in American. Volume 11 of Euwe's opening's series (my mid-fifties edition of it) has a little paragraph about the Müller-Schulze gambit, where 4.Nxe5 gets a question mark, and where it says that after 4... Nxe5 5.d4 Ng6 6.e5 Ng8 7.Bc4 d5 8.Bxd5 c6, Black has a decisive advantage.

When I looked for the Müller - Schulze in my database, hoping for some prehistoric offhand games, I was in for a huge surprise: I found over three thousand games with it; most of them recent blitz games played by a computer named Brause at ICC and other servers - and in which Brause had scored 73 %, occasionally even beating masters and grandmasters.

Randomly playing over a few of those games, I was even more astonished when I saw how deadly this gambit could be. For one thing, Brause had won close to three hundred Müller-Schulze games in 15 moves or less - I had stumbled upon an unsuspected treasury of light openings brilliancies.

Brause - Betrueger, GICS (the German server) blitz, 1997

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.Nxe5 Nxe5 5.d4 Nc6 6.d5 Nb8 7.e5 Ng8 8.d6 c6 9.Bc4 f6 10.Qh5+ g6 (See Diagram) 11.exf6 Qxf6 12.Qe2+ Kd8 13.Ne4 and Black resigned.