Refusing to go Hippo against Bc4 after having played ...a6

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GPerec

The amateur league season started with a win for me. No reason to brag: it was at board 8 of team nr. 8 of my club and my opponent a teenage boy, but they can be dangerous! I think the game is interesting for us because it once again illustrates that all our nice mainline studies often don't help us in real life, in this case when White chooses to play Bc4 after having committed to Nc3. I stubbornly refused to play Hippo, consequently had to suffer some weird manouevering in the opening but got a satisfactory result. Maybe I wouldn't do so again, but what happens after ...b5 or ...e6 isn't much more beautiful. We probably have to live with those Bc4 kids.

wormrose

Nice game!  

Your reluctance to go Hippo was, in part, responsible for the creation of the def Hippo club which is now a fully blown vote chess club with a great team and a full VC schedule, charging into the future like a... well... uh... a thundering Hippopotamus.

frenchylions

Thanks for sharing your game.
The problem here is that you're mixing 2 different ideas ...a6 with ...Nf6, even if this hybrid Pirc-Modern set-up has been suggested in a few articles (in Pirc Dangerous Weapons - James Vigus I think) , I don't fully trust it.
In your game, you "regained" the tempo thanks to 7.Bg5 h6 8.Be3, so you had time to play the usual trick in the Pirc vs Bc4 (that you surely know) 8...Nxe4 9.Nxe4 d5 10.Bd3 dxe4 11.Bxe4,  with the idea ...Nd7-f6 and LSB along the c8-h3 diagonal when Black has a more than ok position.

Against the Nc3 + Bc4 set-up, Bologan's latest recommendation (also others authors Norwood, Moskalenko, Speelman) is ...Nf6 + ...c6 (and sometimes + ...e6 as in the Czech Defence) with the idea ...d5 and Black has active play.  Black is not doomed to play the Hippo vs the Bc4 set-up !

GPerec

Yeah, I know that my opening was a bit shaky. I didn't consider the ...Nxe4 trick because I remembered that THP recommends not to use it unless White has spent a tempo on h3, but as this game was a hybrid anyway, I should have thought about it.

As I wrote before, I would probably play differently next time. The result doesn't really prove anything here besides that Black fares well against careless White bishop moves (which we already knew before) wink.png

And I still haven't found the time to include ...c6 in my repertoire. I should definitely do so in the near future because I'm sure I'll continue to meet Bc4 lines on a regular basis. I would now play it against a Bc4 with pawns on e4 and d3 (and c3), but probably it's as promising against the classical Bc4 setup especially once one has already played ...a6.

The point with this game is: actually, I could have known that Bc4 would be coming after ...a6 because teenage boys play Bc4 every time, so I could have played something else on move 4 and avoided the superfluous pawn move. But one should always play the board and not the man....

After all, the game started sunday morning at 9 a.m. after a very short night and I rode 30 minutes through the october rain by bike to the venue, so taking this into consideration, all in all I am quite satisfied.

wormrose

   30 minutes thru October rain on a bike to play chess... that's dedicaton!