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Hippocleides doesn't care

Hippocleides doesn't care

vbhat
| 20 | Amazing Games

For those of you folllowing David Pruess's blog here on chess.com, you'll know that 4 of us from the Bay Area went to play in Cappelle la Grande, France. Before the tournament, we spent a few days in Paris, where one of Jesse's friends (Jason Stoneking) told us the story of Hippocleides. It's from Herodotus' The Histories and it was a story where the final line fit a couple moments in my game. Here's a link to a summary of the Hippocleides story on Wikipedia.

In the 2nd round, I had the white pieces against GM Piotr Bobras of Poland. When I was preparing for him, I saw he played both the Grunfeld and the Semi-Slav, and I expected a Semi-Slav since it seemed to be what he was playing more often these days. However, I had to respect the "threat" of the Grunfeld and so I reviewed a couple of my games in that opening. It was a pretty wild affair with lots of interesting side variations (by far the most complicated game I played at the tournament), so to follow along, you'll almost certainly need to expand the move list.

Question: How would you continue after 13...c5? There are two moves that come to mind: (A) 14.Qb3 and (B) 14.Nf4.


Question: How would you continue after 17...Qd6?


Question: How would you continue after 18...Nd7?


Question: How would you continue after 23.d6+? Black has two choices: (A) 23...e6 or (B) 23...Kg6.


Question: How would you continue after 25...Bxc3? White has two choices: (A) 26.Re4 or (B) 26.Re3.


Question: How would you continue after 35...e5?

Here's the entire game in one viewer:

I don't like losing in general so I wasn't too happy after this game, but at least it was a full-bodied fight.

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