The Chess Mind

In a pair of responses to my previous post, on the Goring and Danish Gambits, M. Nieuweboer offered the following comments (here and here):

As I have been practioner of the Danish Gambit for about 10 years, I must disappoint you a bit. Capablanca's Defence is OK, of course. But the resulting endings are just dead equal. White's bad results are caused by not accepting this and by overambition.

The good news is, that there is a more promising and even easier variation. It also has the virtue of being rather unknown. Danish Dynamite only spends about half a page on it. It is 1.e4 e5 2.d4 exd4 3.c3 Ne7!? 4.cxd4 d5 or 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 exd4 4.c3 Nge7!? 5.cxd4/5.Bc4 d5. Black will be happy with x.exd5 Nxd5 and does not have to fear the advance e4-e5 either.

PS I have forgotten to mention the deviation 1.e4 e5 2.d4 exd4 3.c3 d5 4.exd5 Qxd5 5.cxd4 Nc6 6.Be3, which does not promise an advantage, but avoids that endgame. So Black players, who employ this line, might be in for a surprise.

M. Nieuweboer:

Thanks for supplying the further information! I hope readers will try the first line and be prepared for the second. It doesn't seem that Black has anything to fear after 6...Bb4+ 7. Nc3 Nf6 (or 7...Nge7) 8.Nf3 Qa5, but it's true: Black doesn't get to slide into an immediate ending.

I disagree with the implication of your first paragrah, however, which suggests that I claimed Black gets an edge with the Capablanca Defense. On the contrary, all three of my evaluative judgments expressed, either directly or indirectly, that the position was equal or balanced:

Black has a very simple, straightforward path to equality starting on move 3...

After 10.Qb3, Black is fine after 10...Qxb3 11.axb3 Nge7 12.Be3 O-O-O 13.O-O a6, when White's poor pawn structure is counterbalanced by the bishop pair...

So let's turn to the main line.... Black is fine here, too, and again we have a position where the better player will win...

That said, perhaps I should change my mind and affirm that Black is slightly better.

As I wrote in an old post, the evaluation of a "slight advantage" should be interpreted in either statistical or psychological terms or as a statement of the sides' relative margin of error. Thus if Goring and Danish players overextend or are frustrated by Black's sidestepping their gambit ambitions ("gambitions"? Maybe we can introduce a new set of terms into the chess lexicon, e.g. "gambitious": The Smith-Morra fan lost like a dog due to his overly gambitious play.), then practically speaking Black has an edge. It's not that the position is objectively better (which could only mean that one side is winning), but that Black has a larger margin of error (see below) or is psychologically happier (reasonably likely). So while Nieuweboer may be right that the problem is White players losing their marbles, this sort of "mental illness" may be sufficiently pervasive to justify an evaluation of =+.

But there is one final possibility: maybe Black's position really is easier to play. Maybe White's lousy score, based on a pretty healthy sample, indicates more than a tendency to overpress. Black's score in the average opening is around 44-45 percent, and that's starting with an equal-to-slightly worse position. It's therefore pretty remarkable that White only manages a miserable 40% from a "dead equal" position; as George Orwell might have said, some equal positions are more equal than others.