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Philidor Def. Hanham. What did the author mean by this?

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TakeTakeOops

There may be misunderstandings here. First of all, you were right to initially think it's white's turn, because that's the diagram I provided. So that's entirely understandable.

Secondly, my assumption is that the side to move isn't relevant actually - right now. Notice that from the diagram in the book itself, two paragraphs are devoted to ideas: one for black and one for white. Assuming the same diagram! So the side to move appears to be irrelevant within the scope of providing ideas "in general" as the author seems to be doing.

Lent_Barsen
TakeTakeOops wrote:

There may be misunderstandings here. First of all, you were right to initially think it's white's turn, because that's the diagram I provided. So that's entirely understandable.

Secondly, my assumption is that the side to move isn't relevant actually - right now. Notice that from the diagram in the book itself, two paragraphs are devoted to ideas: one for black and one for white. Assuming the same diagram! So the side to move appears to be irrelevant within the scope of providing ideas "in general" as the author seems to be doing.

Sorry about having taken things off track then.

Going back to your original question, the meaning of "As for white, he can determine the pawn structure by either pushing d4-d5 or playing dxe5, the latter only making sense if Nf3 -> Nh5 -> Nf5 can follow.", I think it's basically just saying those are options for white if the conditions are favorable. The author then gives an example in the excerpt you provided of where dxe5 works out because black misplayed, and @yetanotheraoc linked to one in his post. It's basically just making you aware of the idea.

TakeTakeOops

Yeah, got it. A major problem was that I appear to have inverted implications. Its resolution made a lot more sense to me. I continue to study and of course an increasing number of things are making sense.

Thanks all for your help!

Compadre_J

I agree with Lent on this one.

I think the Author could have did a better job of limiting the confusion.

I read the sample Picture a few times.

I understand what the Author is saying, but I do think it was a little unnecessary to mention the above information mixed in with other stuff.

My education guess is the Author probably didn’t want to create a Chapter about the situation and decided to forgo making a Chapter and instead just inserted pieces of information mixed in with some of the more common lines.

Obviously, it is impossible to know why the Author decided to present the information in such a manner. We are not the Author so we can only speculate and come up with our own educated guesses as to why the Author did what he did.

In the end, I think we can agree it’s understandable why the OP got confused.

Basically, It’s move 6 with Black to move.

Depending on What Black does, White has options.

If Black plays a Bad move, White can potentially punish Black by doing the d5 or dxe5 moves to take advantage of Black Bad 6th move.

The Author demonstrated the above by having Black play 6…h6

If Black plays a Good move, Than the position continues down the normal mainline set of moves.

The Author demonstrated the above by having Black play 6…0-0

————————

Personally, I don’t like the way the Author inserted the 6…h6 line. I think it could have been its own Chapter.

Lent_Barsen

@Compadre_J

And the thing is, after 6...h6, 7. dxe5 doesn't seem to be that good a move for white either, at least not according to Stockfish. And there Stockfish wants black to play 7...Nxe5, not 7...dxe5, in response.

So it's like the author wanted to present the dxe5, Nh4, Nf5 idea as a line but couldn't seem to do so organically so he shoehorned it in in the form of a line of inferior play for both white and black. Doesn't make a lot of sense. He could have just mentioned the idea and left it at that.

sndeww
Compadre_J wrote:

If nothing is being missed, Than I am afraid you probably wasted your money.

Clearly, Bauer is a terrible Author.

Why on earth would he talk about general pawn moves in a position in which people don’t even play those moves.

He shows a concrete position.

Than starts generalizing?

No wonder the OP is confused..

Baur is a decent writer, I have a book by him.

It's good to talk about generalizations, and you can figure that out pretty easily just by gleaning context clues.

Compadre_J
sndeww wrote:
Compadre_J wrote:

If nothing is being missed, Than I am afraid you probably wasted your money.

Clearly, Bauer is a terrible Author.

Why on earth would he talk about general pawn moves in a position in which people don’t even play those moves.

He shows a concrete position.

Than starts generalizing?

No wonder the OP is confused..

Baur is a decent writer, I have a book by him.

It's good to talk about generalizations, and you can figure that out pretty easily just by gleaning context clues.

Yeah, I have heard good things and bad things about Baur.

I don’t own any of his books so I don’t know.