Nova Daily - 12 March 2025

Hi!

It took me a long time to get my the work on my own game starting today. First of all I felt it time to write my own response to Kevin's most recent blog. It's a long post about a topic that resonates with me, so it deserves much more than just a polite "Good work, keep going!" type of response. So, as he can't possibly be busy enough at all, I wrote him an essay that hopefully will be helpful.

The second part of it having taken a long time for me to get my game going was that my first opponent aborted upon 1.c4. That happens quite a lot, and it may well be the reason why 1.c4 hasn't yet caught up with 1.e4 in terms of popularity.

My opponent started the game with 1.f4. As I had indicated before, I'm quite happy to play 1...c5 in this situation. I'd be inviting the Sicilian, but I'd do it on my own terms. If white accepts, we get into a Closed Sicilian, or variations of it in terms of the Grand Prix, and these lines really play like an English for black. The extra tempo is even useful in terms of having to play accurately: it could teach me some valuable lessons. At the same time I've dodged all of the Open Sicilians, and I don't have to engage in any form of memory test with gambiteers.

The game became extremely tense and chaotic. The melees in the critical phase demanded a lot of thinking time, but in the end I was able to navigate the quagmires better than my opponent.

It was a great fight, and I was both very pleased with how the game went and very disappointed about how the game collapsed for my opponent. So never mind the anticlimax.

There's still a lot of work to be done on this game in terms of building a coherent repertoire against 1.f4. It's not a frequent move but it has its fans, and those fans are usually very well equipped because they've usually played it thousands of times. So it's definitely worth spending some time into.