Nova Daily - 18 February 2025

Hi!

After yesterday's debacle I decided to give myself the rest of the day off, to start anew today. I've yet to check my yesterday's game but will not have enough time today as I'm expected to make an appearance somewhere else in a couple of hours.

In today's game I was confronted with the Hippopotamus, an opening system I hadn't faced before since I took up the English. The name of the system is strikingly appropriate: it looks slow and unassuming, but on the other hand it is versatile, robust, and can be very dangerous once it has gone into attack modus. The subtitle of Alessio De Santis's monograph on the opening is "A Deceptively Dangerous Universal Chess Opening System for Black," and I agree with this assessment. It's very well suited to use against players who lose their cool quickly enough. It has its world-class advocates in Kamsky, Spassky, Radjabov and Ponomatiov, and it has seen the likes of Carlsen and Caruana succumb to it in the past. All in all, not an opening to take lightly.

Unfortunately for my opponent, I'm familiar with De Santis's work. I don't know all the ins and outs of everything, but my knowledge of Hippo systems is sufficient to get my game going and fight for the full point.

The nature of black's setup doesn't allow for much of a theoretical discussion of the game, but the strategic battle is interesting. There were several possibilities for my opponent to make my job much harder, and the game turned into a steamroller when these were missed.

All in all an interesting game, even if it was one-sided.

I'll update the rest of this blog either on Wednesday or on Thursday.