Opening preparation - French defense, Alapin gambit
To improve in chess it is a good idea to know more than just one or two openings. And also in blitz chess it is quite handy to be able to play all kind of different openings lines.
Semion Alapin is probably best known because of the Alapin Sicilian (1.e4 c5 2.c3) but there's a few more lines named after him.
The Alapin French is a gambit line, where white gambits a pawn for fast development, and open lines.
It has been played at least once by the famous top GM and "vice world champion" Paul Keres.
Here's a fresh game I played with it today :
Let's look at the correspondence game by GM Paul Keres :
2200+ database, which shows that white gets good results with this gambit, though not many games have been played :
http://chesstempo.com/gamedb/opening/596
Keres game source, with user comments :
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1073526
Game collection with French defense gambit line games :
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chesscollection?cid=1008691
A blog posting about the Alapin gambit :
http://sawyerbdg.blogspot.nl/2012/07/joy-of-alapin-diemer-gambit-french.html
An article about it, with several variations :
ftp://nic.funet.fi/index/ddg/Gambits/alapin.html
More on Semion Alapin :
