April Fools or April Genius?

April Fools or April Genius

It is finally April. And with every April comes April Fools Day. The day where every person has to be on high alert for the pranks and foolishness of April First. I, myself, was feeling a bit cheeky, so I decided to play a blitz game and play some random opening. I decided to play the Grob. 

The April Fool

I was playing a 3 minute blitz game with white against a 1667 from Russia. I played the foolish Grob opening (no offense to anyone who actually uses the Grob) with g4. Now the Grob is usually not considered a good opening because it overextends a pawn, without taking any serious control of the center or provide any sort of development or positional advantage. Black played c6 and d5, taking control of the center. But they would play a little passive with h6, instead of aggressively attacking with h5. 

I would try to get counterplay by fighting for the center of the board with d3 and e4. Black, in the meantime began capitalizing on the weak dark squares around my king, and he would play h5. I would decide to trade pawns, but it would have been far more effective to displace black's knight. However, black would take the pawn with his rook, which makes it difficult for him to castle, as he would have to castle long.

The game continues with a series of trades, and we soon clear all the center pawns. Black would also decide to trade bishop for knight and give me the bishop pair. However, in the process, I would lose a pawn. Thus, I was down a little bit of material, but black's king and pieces were still rather exposed and inactive. 

We would continue by trading knights. I thought this would be good, as it was black's most active pieces, but I didn't realize that I would trade off my active piece to activate black's rook. Thus, I had to develop my pieces as quickly as possible. I connected my rooks and tried to get my queen to control squares that could attack black's weak king, but black does a good job defending by bringing in the queen to block all of my queen's checks.

I would give a check and trade queens to prevent my opponent from casting. The problem with this is that the king doesn't really need to castle, as we had now entered the endgame, and my pawn structure was far worse than black's pawn structure. I had split and doubled pawns. However, I did have a time advantage, as black had 25 seconds, while I had 50. 

Black would quickly put his pawns on light squares counter-acting my light square bishop's diagonal and preventing my dark square bishop from capture. I would also make the mistake of putting my bishop behind a pawn and giving it a role of basically a pawn. 

To worsen my situation, I would hastily decide to trade my bishop for black's knight, allowing him a passed pawn. I thought I would be able to capture back the pawn with my rook, but I missed that he could defend with his bishop. Additionally, black would take control of an open file and begin massive infiltration.

I would make a futile attempt to try and bring my king and pawns forward, but the result was my king getting boxed in. My bishop would also get kicked out of its square on the other side of the board. During this whole time, I had also been thinking and was now down time, as I had 4 seconds left. 

I would begin moving as quickly as I could. I was able to get my rook to infiltrate and begin clearing pawns. Black would decide to sack his rook for my bishop, as I was low on time. I was so low that I even missed that black still had a passed pawn, so while I went pawn hunting, black promoted. 

And on move 51, when I had 0.4 seconds left, was down 6 points in material, and the eval bar said mate in four for black, I played the most April Fools scumbag move possible by playing Rxf5+ to catch black off guard and grab the win by flagging.

The April Genius

Now, I didn't think that there would be any good game with the same opening. But I was able to find one. In 2019, Hikaru Nakamura would play against Alexey Sarana with the white pieces and play the Grob for a win!

But what are your thoughts on these games? What crazy openings do you use? Let me know!