THE UNIVERSAL ADOPTION of the cataloguing system invented by the meticulous folks who slapped together the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings has sucked some lifeblood from our beloved game.

   Allusion, attribution, and metaphor are the electricity that enlivens and illuminates language. To supplant them with a single letter and a couple of digits is to dim the lights.

    Which conjures up more vivid mental imagery in your head, C27 or the Frankenstein-Dracula Variation of the Vienna? Which descriptor of the black pawns at a6, b6, c7, d6, e6, f7, g6, h6, with both bishops firing from fianchetto formation more accurately captures black's slippery set up, B06 or The Hippopotamus Defense? Call the formation B06 and you lose the wonderful mental picture suggested by black’s bishops, namely a pair of dark hippo eyes peering just above the surface of some fetid swamp,  .    

Then there’s offbeat, left-sided pawn push on white’s first move that we used call pawn to queen knight four. That thrust is forevermore etched In my mind as the Orangutan Opening because Savielly Tartakower went for a walk through the London Zoo and was reminded of that move when he spotted the resident orangutan hanging from a bar by its hairy, outstretched left arm.

The Chess Opening Bestiary is replete with Dragons, Rats, Elephants, and Hedgehogs, all endangered and soon to suffer extinction under the relentless weight of B72s, B06s, or some other vacuous numeric designation.    

And what of the all the history that will soon  disappear under the inexorable march of ECO classification? Kids will grow up thinking of 1.g4 as A00 and thus learn nothing of Karl Grob and the Spike he fervently hoped would produce an ay-oh-oh from his opponents. And ponder the history tossed out the window when such lines as the Wilkes-Barre, Hamppe-Allgaier, Cambridge Springs, and other ECO unfriendly terms succumb to arid classification of the chess technocrats.

    Lest you think I’m making too much of the demise of colourful nomenclature, ponder how dull internet chess would be if your opponents had names like C12 or G78 instead of the wildly imaginative, sometimes provocative, and often mysterious handles they have now.

Which brings me to Waiting for BB.

While playing under the handle Steelhead, I drew Waiting for BB in an all-play-all tournament at ChessWorld. I opened with 1. e4. Waiting for BB responded with a French (C00). I steered the game into a Tarrasch (C05), because, as an inveterate French player, this was the variation that had given me severe cases of heartburn.    

Waiting for BB responded with 3… f5!?, and I was gobsmacked.

    I’d played hundreds of French defenses from both sides of the board and had never met this pseudo-Dutch (A84) treatment. All right, I thought, leaning back in my seat, I’ll close the centre stick my pieces on good, centrally located squares and await developments. Things went swimmingly. I won the exchange and steeled myself to the task of bringing home the full point by not making any egregious errors for the remainder of the game.

    As play unfolded, we chatted. “Why the handle ‘Waiting for BB’ I asked. Who’s BB, Bertholt Brecht, Brigit Bardot, BB King?’"

    “No,” came back the reply, “I’m playing someone named BB35 in another tournament and he takes forever to reply, so I changed my handle to ‘Waiting for BB.’ “

    Hmm…feisty, I thought as Waiting for BB slowly enveloped my pieces and strangled me until I cried uncle.

“How does it feel to be beaten by a woman?” asked Waiting for BB soon after I conceded.    

I told her that there would have been less sting if the woman had been Judit Polgar, but added that it wasn’t all that bad. To this Waiting for BB confided that she purposely disguised her gender when playing on-line to ensure that it had no influence on the game. She added that when she played over-the-board tournaments, she could never be sure that wins against her male opponents hadn’t been in part due to the fact that they had been distracted by her cleavage.

    I wrote back and assured her that this had clearly not been an issue in our encounter and suggested that if she would like to put the theory to the test, she could send me a revealing 8x10, which I would then place next to my computer to test if it would distract me during the course of our next game.

There was to me no next game. My offer elicited a curt response. “Have a nice life,” it read. I took this as a rebuff of some sort and never did get a picture.

I was soon over Waiting for BB – a handle she changed shortly thereafter – but her unorthodox French remained a bittersweet memory.  I began using whenever I encountered the Tarrasch.   

What to call it? One night, while analyzing a game started the same way, I fixed on the pawns lodged at f5 and d5 with the gap between them and the light went on – the Cleavage Variation. And so it remains until some micro manager from ECO affixes some numeric designation to it like 34B.