Arctic Defense: Drunken Knight Variation

Well, such an awesome official name with no actual master games !?!  It's a shame. Well, it appeared in one of my recent games as black. So, I discovered that my crazy opening has such a great name LMAO :

Any drunken arctic thoughts ?!? 

 ty  ...c4??

Salut fBis!  Yeah, white has tons of good developping moves and a considerable positional advantage. However, it's difficult to realize it and black can easily equalize in 5-10 moves.

ty

some moves seem sometime ...to wait and see. i just discovered that, stupid was to attack all the time, sometimes repeat a move, or sometimes sthg ..weird, with amateurs, it works, even if the Stockfish quotes me 4 or 5 (against the move I did).

Here the black seem to lose time , tempo too, but in fact, i shoudn't take advantage of that with whites

greetings

Hi yigor I think you must have had some grey goose vodka when you played that opening lol 

That was being played in England about 60 years ago by a rather elderly gent called (I think) Thompson. He called it the Hippopotamus. An issue of Chess had an article about it and 4 of his games, one of which, IIRC, was a draw in a simultaneous against Korchnoi.

In the late 60s a strongish player in the Birmingham League took it up. It certainly had a shock effect: in one game, after 1...f6, his opponent took off one pair of glasses and put on another pair, as if to see better...

Hi, bro!  The Grey Goose is excellent but expensive. Drunken Arctic knights like me need something basic. 

Yes, it's evaluated at +1 but how are U planning to materialize this positional advantage ?!? In my last game, my (about ELO 1900) opponent played normally and quietly as white and I virtually equalized just in few moves. 

Thanks for these interesting details! 

The hippopotamus is another defense

I have all the space, more activity and an easy game. You instead have a silly knight on f7

Good surprising opening, hypermodern, black hopes to hit on e5 and easily equalise

I've seen the knight get "fianchetto'd" on the queenside from time to time. One example is the La Bourdonnais variation of the French Defense, where white will often play Nb1-Na3-Nc2. One advantage in that scenario is that it supports the push of your central pawn, without allowing a pin by an opposing bishop and without getting in the way of your own bishop.

I've also seen white knights do good work on the kingside from f2 in some closed systems, usually after white plays f2-f4. From f2, the knight controls the g4 and h3 squares and can later hop to e4 when the time is right.

All that said:

What is the knight on f7 doing? You haven't played f5 or g6, so you don't need a knight to help control any weakened squares. You don't want to quickly push e5, because after ...Nxe5 and ...fxe5 your king is open to ideas of Qh5+. Is it just one of those moves intended to be provocative?