The Full Roast

If you haven't got a sense of humour, you might want to give this post a miss 

Many of you will have come across the Hammerschlag opening, more affectionately called the Pork Chop. Rumour has it Fischer played it online winning against a strong GM, but this could never be substantiated.

And then there is the very rare variant of Saragossa's Opening which I call the Lamb Chop.

So what happens when you combine both ideas. Now, you can play the first four moves in any order. If Black prevents you with ...Bc5+ or ...Qh4+, as long as you continue after the check, you are still playing it. Ok, and yes Black can play an early ...Bf5 preventing Qc2 so you have to play d3 and then Qc2 at the next available opportunity. Hopefully this makes sense.

So I call this crazy opening the Full Roast as it combines the Pork Chop and the Lamb Chop. Ok, you would be a little crazy to combine Pork and Lamb on the same plate, but you would also be a little crazy to play this opening too!

But heck it is a lot of fun to play and difficult to refute outright.

Thoughts?

Why is it fun to play handicapped???

Hmmm, maybe you missed the opening sentence - sense of humour.

But to answer your question, for lots of reasons. If people didn't have fun playing handicapped, you wouldn't see all the wonderful (and unsound) openings that you do.

For one thing, you could be a stronger player wanting to make an even match rather than give pawn odds and give yourself a challenge at the same time.

You may be a chess coach giving the kids a fun challenge - this is why I play it. e.g. When you can beat my full roast, I will play something main-stream.

You may want to have a fun night at the local club, so you run a full-roast tourney - like you would run a Latvian Gambit night. I suspect there will be a number of White wins (by stronger players of course). [Damn it - I lost to the Full Roast again!! grrr]

It actually gives juniors a valuable lesson - that something that is completely unsound is extremely difficult to win against a good player. ie don't expect to win easily if you out-book your opponent - a better game still has to be won!

Or you might just want to confuse the heck out of your opponent albeit with the risk they might actually break-through. But I would never play this in a serious game of course.

Out of interest, Komodo 9 evaluates the position as +1.5 for Black. So if this is correct, essentially you are giving pawn-and-a-half odds. Many a master have given these types of odds. In saying this, of course nobody is as strong as Komodo so realistically you are playing half a pawn to maybe 1 pawn down.

But is it more fun to play with your king on f2 than on e1? Unlike the bongcloud this isn't a real opening. The bongcloud at least has masters who employ it.

You are right, it isn't a "real" opening, whatever that means. I can't find any games where someone has actually played it. It came to my mind because of the symmetry rather than anything else.

I suspect the Bongcloud is an equally poor choice technically. It has only been played 5 times in FIDE tournament practice and none by master players as far as I can see.

Some interesting stats...

Surprisingly, the Pork Chop has been played 26 times with 14 of those games from 2000+ players. Schneider even pulled it out against Van Wely once but it was just a blitz match.

The Lamb Chop is in comparison more common and has had 88 outings with Huu Nguyen (2100+ player) playing it regularly. What is really interesting is Tartakower employed the Lamb Chop against Thomas at Baden-Baden in 1925. Ended up as a draw.

Sadly I haven't found a single Full Roast amongst them.

So at your next FIDE event, you could have the honour as being the first person in the world to play the Full Roast! 

I think the proper name for 1.c3 e5 2.Qc2 is the Hanham or Hayward variation of the Saragossa Opening. I noticed Bill Wall has played it a few times.