opening advantage
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I have seen this in a few openings, and I am puzzled by the loss of a pawn right away.
This is a very famous opening gambit called the blackmar-diemer gambit ... diemer was a nazi chess master who played this line almost exclusively and scored many brilliant (I mean really hilariously brilliant!) wins with it against second tier opponents. Against first rate players it loses. It is certainly playable if you aren't a super strong super booked up player (if people don't currently address you as Master so-and-so, and bow, and stand around and take photos of you, you can play it
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Poor Diemer lost his marbles later in life. A colorful character. And his games are extraordinarily entertaining!
I used to play it, but went to the King's Indian Attack. Still, it can catch people off guard.
and it's 3 half-moves.
Emil Diemer: turning amateurs into exclams since 1930...
Cover the move list and do this "guess the move style" -- Diemer sets a diabolical trap. You have to be a decent player just to fall into it.
Fezzik wrote:
This is indeed a silly gambit. But there are people who believe the only way to play chess correctly is by making gambits. This particular gambit has a huge following, but with almost no GM games to support it.
The BDG retains its cult status despite the numerous lines that give Black an advantage because Black's advantage isn't instantly lethal and many of the cultists have found cool tactics in the resulting positions. They publish their every win and rarely discuss the losses. In my database, White wins 43%, draws only 19%, and loses a whopping 38%! Black actually outperforms White in rating!
Advocates of the opening will look at those stats and argue the opening is great because of its low % of draws!
In games between masters, Black wins 45% (white won ~22%), with most of the games occurring before computers got strong enough to give an objective analysis of the opening.
But all the stats, concrete variations, and logic in the world won't kill the BDG.
Someone will find a game that Juan Bellon Lopez or Wolfgang Schmidt lost as Black and say that the opening is brilliant! They'll ignore the 70 other games that saw the GMs playing Black win.
Professional/Serious (GM) players don't play the BDG. Therefor the people playing BDG are amateurs... they're playing for fun against other amateurs. And the BDG is fun. Is that so awful?
Someone said, "Below master level all openings are sound." I think that applies to BDG.
