Only One Sicilian Per Customer?
When I was a kid in the 1970s, there was a TV commercial featuring one person walking down a hallway enjoying his peanut butter (straight from the jar) and another person, approaching at a right angle, enjoying his chocolate. The men collide and their foodstuffs mix, but to their mutual delight, they find the combination of chocolate and peanut butter an improvement. Let's call this the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Principle, or PBCP, for short: combine two things and you get a better thing.
Turning to chess: over the years I've worked as a chess teacher, many of my students have been fascinated by the complications of the Najdorf and Dragon Variations of the Sicilian Defense. Most have chosen one or the other, but every now and again, I find students who apply the PBCP to the Sicilian and play something like this:
1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 g6 6.Be3 Bg7
So far, so Dragon.
7.f3 a6
Err...
8.Qd2 Nbd7 9.O-O-O b5
In the normal Dragon, Black doesn't waste time on a6, sometimes plays b5 but almost never this early, and finally, puts the knight on c6 rather than d7. Black's last three moves are Najdorf moves, not Dragon moves, while Black's 6th and 7th moves are Dragon moves virtually never to be seen in the Najdorf.
That's merely descriptive, however; it doesn't tell whether or why the combination of the two approaches is good, bad, or neutral. Those are normative questions, and my answer to them is, or at least was, that the combination is a poor one. In the Dragon, Black needs to generate queenside counterplay as rapidly as possible, and the problem is that the a6/b5/Bb7/Nbd7 setup will not put much pressure on White's king for a long time to come.
Imagine my surprise, then, when the strong French GM and openings specialist Igor-Alexandre Nataf played this very line against GM Aleksander Delchev just a few days ago! The game began with the exact moves above, and continued and concluded thus:
10.g4 Bb7 11.a3N Nb6 12.Bh6 Bxh6 13.Qxh6 Qc7 14.h4 d5 15.e5 Qxe5 16.Bxb5+! axb5 17.Rhe1
17...Ng8? 18.Qd2 Qg7 19.Ncxb5 Kf8 20.g5! Rc8 21.Qf4 Nf6 22.Rxe7! Nh5 23.Qd6 Nc4 24.Re8+! 1-0 (Delchev-Nataf, Herceg-Novi 2005)
Very pretty, and a nice object lesson for teachers wanting to scare their students away from this hybrid variation. Yet while Black's position was always precarious, White was not at all winning by force after 17.Rhe1. In short, I don't know if the "Najdorf Dragon" is a peanut butter cup or a combination of mustard and tuna fish. (Mmm...indigestion.)
Whatever its objective merits or demerits, it does have the advantage of being almost completely unexplored. So, for those of you who prefer the road less traveled, I suggest taking a look. Happy trails!
Turning to chess: over the years I've worked as a chess teacher, many of my students have been fascinated by the complications of the Najdorf and Dragon Variations of the Sicilian Defense. Most have chosen one or the other, but every now and again, I find students who apply the PBCP to the Sicilian and play something like this:
1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 g6 6.Be3 Bg7
So far, so Dragon.
7.f3 a6
Err...
8.Qd2 Nbd7 9.O-O-O b5
In the normal Dragon, Black doesn't waste time on a6, sometimes plays b5 but almost never this early, and finally, puts the knight on c6 rather than d7. Black's last three moves are Najdorf moves, not Dragon moves, while Black's 6th and 7th moves are Dragon moves virtually never to be seen in the Najdorf.
That's merely descriptive, however; it doesn't tell whether or why the combination of the two approaches is good, bad, or neutral. Those are normative questions, and my answer to them is, or at least was, that the combination is a poor one. In the Dragon, Black needs to generate queenside counterplay as rapidly as possible, and the problem is that the a6/b5/Bb7/Nbd7 setup will not put much pressure on White's king for a long time to come.
Imagine my surprise, then, when the strong French GM and openings specialist Igor-Alexandre Nataf played this very line against GM Aleksander Delchev just a few days ago! The game began with the exact moves above, and continued and concluded thus:
10.g4 Bb7 11.a3N Nb6 12.Bh6 Bxh6 13.Qxh6 Qc7 14.h4 d5 15.e5 Qxe5 16.Bxb5+! axb5 17.Rhe1
17...Ng8? 18.Qd2 Qg7 19.Ncxb5 Kf8 20.g5! Rc8 21.Qf4 Nf6 22.Rxe7! Nh5 23.Qd6 Nc4 24.Re8+! 1-0 (Delchev-Nataf, Herceg-Novi 2005)
Very pretty, and a nice object lesson for teachers wanting to scare their students away from this hybrid variation. Yet while Black's position was always precarious, White was not at all winning by force after 17.Rhe1. In short, I don't know if the "Najdorf Dragon" is a peanut butter cup or a combination of mustard and tuna fish. (Mmm...indigestion.)
Whatever its objective merits or demerits, it does have the advantage of being almost completely unexplored. So, for those of you who prefer the road less traveled, I suggest taking a look. Happy trails!
Posted by Dennis Monokroussos on
Thursday May 19, 2005 at 7:20pm