When I first stumbled upon this variation, I thought I would name it something simple, like the Kiselev variation or Butcher the Sicilian, because Miodrag Perunovic wrote a course covering it and GM Vitaliy Kiselev played a lot of it against the Sicilian. Even Gotham Chess and Will Graif recommended it in some videos. But then I realized that most people won't read the blog unless I have a beautiful woman as the thumbnail, so for the purposes of views and likes, I will call this variation The Beckinsale. I bet Big Mio wishes he'd have thought of it.

  Now, other than the poster, this is no joke. This reply to the Sicilian sidesteps most theory and is, statistically, the best weapon against the Sicilian on Lichess. And I mean it for ratings above 1800, games that are not bullet or even blitz and that were played in the last year. Serious stuff! While Mio would probably explain it better, I can tell you that following these lines leads to some really cool ideas, but also very simple ones. Yes, the Beckinsale is as easy on the moves as it is on the eyes.

  So how does a total noob find something new in what is probably the most theoretically examined defense for Black? Well, simple: use the wonderful Lichess database, maybe with my own LiChess Tools extension installed to help you out, and look not for the best Stockfish moves, but for the most winning moves, or maybe the sharpest. Yes, there is a huge difference. Positions where the evaluation of the most played move is terrible is what keeps YouTubers fed.

  Have you tried learning the Sicilian? With its many variations (uninspiringly) named after ugly male chess players, long theoretical lines which "win" because some extra pawn in the end game? Not only is it horrible, but it is boring as well. If you are a grandmaster, surely you don't care about what I have to say, but if you are not, you probably know that the most common form of the Sicilian is the so called Open Sicilian, consistently played six or seven times more often than the Closed Sicilian. Well, guess what we're going to play? Nc3! Bye-bye, OS!

  Black will play Nc6, the "Traditional, Closed" variation, because they are boring and uncreative, and we will play Bb5, threatening to capture the knight and double Black's pawns. Why are we even bothering threatening stuff that won't really matter at our level? Donno! But everybody is hung up on these pawns and their structure, so Black will reply by moving the knight away, attacking our bishop and threatening to take it and be the ones keeping the bishop pair. For some reason. So they will play Nd4. To which we will play The Beckinsale! Back when she was all dressed in leather and hunting werewolves: Nf3.

They will take. a6, d6 and g6 are also moves, but they won't play them. It makes little sense, they want the bishop pair. Even before, they didn't have to play Nc6, they could have played d6, e6 or g6, and they often do, sometimes it transposes, because where else is that knight going to go? And after Nxb5 and Nxb5 your moves, as White, are 90% of the time THE SAME! No theory, no complicated rules. Everything simple, like this:

They will probably kick your knight back Nc3, you will play d4, they will take and you will take with the queen Qxd4 - go Kate!, since there is no queenside knight on the board anymore, then castle short O-O. Four moves you don't have to think about, winning time that your opponent has to spend thinking. And there is more:

• on Nf6, you play Bg5
• on b5, you play Bf4 or a4
• on Qc7 or Bb7, you play a4.
• if they attack your queen, Qb4, even with the risk of a discovered attack on pawn push
• your knight will go Na4! How dim is that? But it will coordinate with the queen to attack the hole on b6, a perfect outpost.
• if the dark bishop is out, you can even castle queenside O-O-O
• if they don't kick your knight on b5 away, then the queen and the knight will be unstoppable on c7.

The ideas are very simple:

1. induce the only developed Black piece to exchange itself
2. capture the only forward pawn of Black
3. get your pieces out quick
4. attack the vulnerable queenside as fast as possible
5. block Black's attempts to develop

Meanwhile, Black has moved just pawns:

The situation is as follows: White has three pieces out, a centralized queen and a safe king. Black has... long term plans. Which one would you pick?

And I know I will get comments like "A Sicilian player would never..." or "Stockfish says the position is equal" or even "You went Nf3 and d4 anyway, how is this not an open Sicilian?".  You will probably not defeat Caruana with it, but most Lichess players will fall for it and Stockfish doesn't count here.

But even so. For all Lichess players for all time, this variation wins for White in 57% of the cases, to Black's 38%. Restrict the database to 1800+, Rapid+ and the last year and you get 51% over 39%. For 2200+ it's 47/41. For the Masters: 54/31 . Against the Sicilian! In the four games played at 2500+ level on Lichess in the last year in serious games, three games were won by White.

Enough teasing. I wrote a study about it, based on the most played moves on Lichess and what the best responses are. Then there are some really fun lines and games, for your entertainment.

How to handle the Sicilian as White

Let me know how you CRUSHED with it, or whatever is memeable now. And as always, have fun!

  For a long time, the narrative of the human race was space exploration and expansion, a story usually predicated by a total globalization event that turned us all from warrying tribes into one planetary nation or rather race. However, they always kind of skip over this. Star Trek did a decent job explaining a devastating global war followed by a first contact with the Vulcans, but most of the books and TV series and film franchises just assume that somehow we just forget about millennia long national concepts and unite.

  I won't discuss the validity of this idea, let's just say I am skeptical, but I want to first contrast it against another concept, one that seems to be the exact opposite. But is it? I am talking about stories like Silo, Fallout, Metro 2033 and so many others that go the other direction: after a devastating conflict, the world is fractured instead of united, leading to very different groups of people. True, this is mostly related to stories about terrible apocalyptic events from which humanity has never recovered. Because, the idea goes, to be recovered, humanity needs to rekindle civilization and reunite, presumably towards its final goal of space exploration and expansion.

  Yet, when you think about it, the two stories quickly seem to blend together. The united federation of humans often meets alien races, with which they enter in complex relationships of either conflict or cooperation. These stories usually also contain very diversified groups of people which work together, each using their special skills, for the better of the team. Lift a bit to view the story from a little higher and you get diverse cultures engaged with each other, often interested by the same resources. Go lower, into group dynamics, and you find the same pattern. Similarly, with the stories of tribes of people who get separated and thus grow different, there is always some moment of contact, where either the main characters or the tribes as a whole have to meet with other cultures.

   Neither of these opposing patterns, which in the end converge, seem to ultimately accept the concept of cultural unification. They reject one culture being superior to another, even when trying to somehow separate the good guys from the bad based on how similar their principles are to the people writing the story and those consuming it. I postulate that there has to be more to this than just a simple reflection of our species' tribalism.

   Believe it or not, this series of thoughts started from something John Hands said in his book Cosmosapiens, when he was criticizing the theories trying to explain altruism and cooperation. He rightly noticed that sometimes animals from a different species were helping out others, with little chance of the same help being reciprocated. And while personally I think that behaviors like altruistic cooperation can stem from a vague desire that someone would reciprocate in the future, just as selflessly and independently from any foreseeable reward, I had another idea. What if there is no simple in-group/out-group logic at work here, but something more subtle, like the uncanny valley? What if this is actually part of most organisms, perhaps even unicellular ones, a sort of peer pressured mechanism of preserving identity?

   Hear me out. When you think wars, who are the sides usually fighting? Neighbors. You don't ask your neighbor "hey, man, I need resources. Can you please let me pass through your country and get them from that asshole far from us which has a different religion and culture?". Instead you find something so alien and utterly unsufferable about your neighbor, something that will motivate you to make the significantly smaller effort of attacking them. At the personal level it's the same thing. You don't go out of your way to go into conflicts with unknown people in some other town, instead you fight with your neighbors or relatives or people at work. In most of these cases, they are people very similar to you.

   What if an animal would have no issue helping one from another species or one that is kin and part of the group, but have a strong and instinctual dislike from the one of the same species yet at the very edge of that group? What if the uncanny valley phenomenon, the strong feeling towards things that are very close to something, yet not quite it, like humanoid robots or artificial plants, is a mechanism evolved to keep an identity safe from corruption? You see it in kids, tormenting the one in their own group who is least like most of them, what if the reason species stay stable for so long, only to suddenly turn into another or go extinct, is that the species works collectively, instinctively, against divergence? Only when extreme events allow this divergence does a group break, split into two different entities.

   Let's discuss another formula for science-fiction: the dystopia. Something that usually starts making sense or being enforced by other people who believe it makes sense, only to turn into an oppressive force against self expression and evolution? The solution for this is "the revolution", a word that literally means turn-around or rotation. But isn't it the same story? A group of marginalized and oppressed people, finding the opportunity and resources to break away from the main group, maybe even take over the reigns? Normally the revolutionaries are so similar to their oppressors that they routinely pretend to be one another, the only difference being a subtle divergence of ideology. The larger and more powerful the oppressor, the lower the chance to get free.

   And this is the rub, isn't it? Generalizing - maybe to unhealthy extremes - these stories tell just one: beings naturally attempt to diverge, filling all evolutionary niches, unless their group reigns them in in order to preserve the identity of that group.

   So getting back at the stories of separate and vastly different groups, they are basically a respite, a fantasy escape, from the ideas of globalization, against the tyranny of the vast majority. It's a maybe unconscious revolt against stagnation, a curious attempt to explore what would happen to people if they were allowed to try out things by themselves. Many terrible things, for sure, but the general idea of freedom of expression is a good one. Perhaps the resurgence of this kind of stories just goes to prove there is a strong natural pressure against the arrogant declarations for "the only way" of existing. It's a zeitgeist thing.

   A long time ago I was a strong believer in globalization, in the abolition of borders. They seemed idiotic to me. Why would you separate the intelligent beings on this world with abstract and artificial walls? What is the point? Wouldn't it be better to all just live in peace together? And then I found my answer: we need the borders, just like we need individual privacy and walls in our houses. Because not being able to live differently means you are not allowed to live. In this light, all attempts to culturally overtake the world are the short path to dystopia. A world of American democracy, European social bureaucracy, Russian oligarchy or Chinese collectivism would be just as bad. It's the one we have, preserving all of these and more, that is the superior world.

   So in that vein, we need more stories like the Expanse, where people did conquer the stars, but continue to be tribal. Where every asteroid is its own country, with its own rules and social norms. Not a world, but a loosely coupled multitude of worlds. It's not about Dwarves, elves and humans - although now you probably recognize the pattern - but about releasing the cork and letting humanity flow and fill all corners of possibility.

   Yet, as clear as this has become to me, I have little hope it will happen. Look at the Internet, the closest thing we have to a simulation of the future. Instead of having the freedom of choice, we have coalesced towards large corporate oligarchies who collectively control what we are supposed to feel and think. Instead for each having our little corner of paradise or abysmal hell, we are being corralled like cattle through the narrow paths allowed to us and which will eventually lead us to  slaughter. We live in a world where even the so call liberals - a word derived from the Latin for free - actively campaign and collaborate to destroy dissent.

   Can you imagine a narrative of vastly different groups of people, all equally free to exist, being popular today? A world where Nazis burn Jews alive, of Chinese reeducation camps, with Americans living free and/or invading Greenland, cannibal tribes living on islands, Israelis and Arabs kill each other, nuclear war is something that just happens occasionally, entire nations starve to death while others live in gluttony. A world of eternal atrocity and bliss, sometimes at the same time...

   Hey!, you will say, isn't that more or less our world today? And aren't we always complaining about it? Complaining is part of it. Of course, the limited resource of one planet is also a big factor. Human empathy against suffering as well. However, I believe this world to be superior to any ideological closed garden from which we are not allowed to exit.

   Note that I am not advocating for anarchy here. I do believe in consequences for actions, I just don't believe in a world where some actions become impossible to even contemplate.

   Perhaps war itself can be explained by this absolute necessity of breaking apart before we merge together into amorphous blobs. And if that is true, war is already very near. Or it was never over to begin with.

  The true meaning of science is to examine who we are, where are are coming from and where we are going. In Cosmosapiens: Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe, John Hands examines the state of scientific knowledge on these matters and finds it lacking.

  It's not like we don't have ideas of what the universe is and where it came from, but we cling to the "orthodox" belief in some theory or conjecture rather than use the scientific method to examine evidence and refine our understanding. The modern trend of financing research only in the largely accepted knowledge areas doesn't help.

  John Hands argues that regardless what the truth is, evidence should drive our choice of theoretical hypotheses and not dogma. Alas, monkeys be monkeys and science monkeys will also be monkeys. More often than not, only currently accepted theory research is funded and dissenting views are socially ostracized.

  The biggest problem with Cosmosapiens is its length. John Hands could have stopped at any time, wrote four books with the same material, but instead he insisted on covering cosmology, evolution, consciousness, artificial intelligence in a single book. That makes his material repetitive and feeling, ironically, dogmatic.

  I just talked to a friend about this book and he felt strongly that the book was about intelligent design and creationism. I don't agree. Hands made a huge effort of cataloguing the various theories, both accepted and ridiculed, exposing at every step the agreeing and disagreeing evidence towards every one of them.

  The author decries the dogmatic resistance to any new ideas, the false certainty with which orthodox belief is presented as absolute truth: the Big Bang, Darwinian and neo-Darwinian evolution, the nature of consciousness and so on. Theories are supposedly falsifiable, but so much of the fundamental underpinnings of modern science are just unfalsifiable conjectures.

  Moreover, the complexity of the universe is simplified to absurd levels in theoretical research, using Occam's Razor as another dogmatic constraint of what we can imagine the universe to be. In reality, the universe, life and everything has a much more complex dynamic, where intricately small networks lead to emergent behavior that can't be explained by simplistic models.

  Bottom line: science should be carried on scientific principles, not egomaniacal or dogmatic tribalism. We might not know the exact answer to how the universe, our solar system, our planet or life on Earth started, but we owe it to ourselves to be honest about it and carry on with seeking the answers while honestly accepting what we know and what we don't know.

  I will tell you the truth: I am scared of the Scandinavian Defense. I don't know about you, but when you start learning chess you know you have to take space in the center with the pawns and develop pieces and not come out with the queen, right? So what is Black doing? What is that d5 move to my e4 ?! What do they intend to do when I take the pawn? Come out with the queen? Didn't we just say it's a bad idea? It's like I am being trolled. And I have no idea what to do!

  Well, Adamisko did it again! He found out a tricky reply for White which is ridiculously fun to play, easy to get into and hard to get out of as Black. He presented the main ideas in his YouTube video, but I've gone ahead and created a study for it, with some games I found in the Lichess database and various extended ideas.

  So what's the deal? What do you do after Black plays d5, attacking your e4 pawn? Do you take? Do you advance? No. You calmly play d3. Note that you can start with d3 and to the rather predictable d5, play e4. That's like saying "Go ahead, punk! Play the Scandi! Make my day!". The balls! Yet, in a weird way, you are playing chess based on the principles I listed above: you push a pawn to control the center and, when attacked, you protect it, so it continues to control the center.

  And if they take, which they normally do? Well, again with the principles: develop a knight on c3. And if they take again... err... develop the other knight on f3! And if they take again?! OMG, you just gave up the two center pawns and entered the Michael Jackson gambit!

  There are three types of replies from Black. To the green ones, you answer with Bg5. To the blue one, you answer with Bf4. And to the really bad Bg4 you just do Ne5. What were you trying to do there, bishop, you pin-head?

  The best thing is... no one seems to play these lines. The most common reply, Nf6, has been played in just 13 1800+ Rapid+ games. Just 3500 games have been played in all, with a 55% win rate for White, a statistic that keeps true regardless of rating and time control, for this variation as well as most of the others.

  Plans are pretty easy to remember, too:

• you have no c, d or e pawns anymore. So bring the rooks to the d and e files - often with tempo or pin on the enemy queen or king
• castle short to free both rooks
• your queen is already on the c-file, eyeing that juicy c7 spot
• get your bishops out immediately, attacking and pinning the same center squares in the enemy territory
• bring your knights out and attack the c7, d7 and f7 squares - often doubly attacked

  In other words: develop, develop, develop! If you like attacking chess, then this is the blood soaked, gore filled opening you've always dreamed of. Black wanted to troll you and get an early attacking position? You out-troll them!

  

  The video is pretty thorough and the study is even more loaded with stuff, so I will just present you some ending positions, just to wet your appetite:

  

  

Just look at those silly Black pieces marked with the yellow markings of shame! They are useless, blocked by their own pieces, stuck on the other side of the board or pinned and paralyzed. And look at the White attacking lines!

The funny thing is Adamisko is a Scandi player! And if the opponent plays something else, let's say we start with d3 and they do e5, a really ridiculous reply is... d4! , getting into a Scandinavian Defense with the White pieces!

And then there are the "refutation lines". With perfect play, Black manages to get... a half pawn advantage at the end. This is one of those "solid gambits" where you sacrifice material, but you are never behind.

Let's talk study. It has a lot of chapters, but most of them are game compilations with many lines - I've only selected the ones that generated an advantage, for various reasons. With the LiChess Tools browser extension you can even collapse the game chapters, as they are organized into one main chapter and many subchapters.

Here is the chapter list for the Michael Jackson Gambit study:

1. Intro chapter with the main moves and plans
2. Video chapter following the video exactly - with LiChess Tools you can play the video in a picture-in-picture kind of popup while you play the moves
3. The reversed Scandi moves that lead to the many gambits Adamisko created as a Scandi player
4. Game chapters, with real life games merged together for many variations
5. The refutation line(s) and what to do

Finally, here is the video describing the gambit and its main lines:

[youtube:mIv7NPzihek]

Let me know how you used this in your games!

  A while ago I wrote a browser extension called Bookmark Explorer that no one used because it had such a banal name, but it was pretty cool. I just let it die when Google took it down for being a manifest V2 extension. I plan to modernize it and make it work for modern browsers. It is now also renamed as...

Bookmark Surfer Daedalus!

  OK, it's still a silly name, but you know how naming is the hardest part, right?

  This blog post will become the official web page for the extension.

  But what does it do? Well, it allows to easily navigate in bookmark folders. Let's say you have one of those folders with hundreds of links or you, like me, open a hundred YouTube videos that you plan to eventually watch (yeah, right!) and your main memory consumption is keeping those tabs in the background. Now all you have to do is just put all of these into bookmark folders and open the first one. From it, you can quickly go forward or backward with either mouse or key combinations. The next page in the folder will be preloaded while you read the current one, so that you switch faster.

  Features:

• right click on a link and add it to the Read Later folder without having to open it (the extension opens it in the background to get the final URL and the title of the page, then closes it immediately)
• click on extension button to get a popup with arrows forward/backward to navigate in whichever folder the current page is bookmarked in. You also get a button to move the current page to the end of the folder, so as to read it later than the others.
•  use Ctrl-Shift-K/L for backward/forward navigation. You can also change the key shortcuts in the browser.
• define patterns that determine what makes a URL unique. For example some web sites have different pages with the exact same URL, but a parameter changed, like YouTube or some blog platforms. Maybe even hashes. You can define the pattern for those domains. The normal pattern is just the domain and the path, ignoring query parameters and hashes.
• manage the bookmarks in the current folder. You can select them individually, delete them, move them to the end or the start and so on.
• see the bookmarks that you deleted - whether with the extension or some other mechanism - and choose which one to permanently remove or restore to their original location.
• notifications of pages that you bookmarked multiple times
• you can export the URLs of the selected items in an entire folder

  This extension is essential for people who read a lot on the Internet, like researchers or simply people who love information.

Intro

  This post is about a crazy experiment that I undertook today: find as many decent chess YouTubers and create an Excel with their characteristics, with the purpose of finding the best chess YouTuber for 2025. I have to say the result is underwhelming, but the effort is real.

Methodology

  So, I started with a list of 70 people! First the people that I already knew about and which I either followed or had decided are not worth it. Then I search on YouTube, via both YouTube and Google search engines, for the word "chess" and picked the channels that appeared with content in 2025. Then I started analysing on several criteria:

• country of origin
• language of videos (is it in English or not)
• subscribers
• professional or high rated content
• discussing their own games
• discussing other people's games
• having content specifically about chess theory, openings, that kind of thing
• is content generated with AI (like reading the prompt with a machine or showing only images and video that is generated by AI)
• whether it is a personal channel or that of an institution of multiple people
• if the videos feature the human faces of their owners (or are just audio or just video footage of other people)
• a rating on how entertaining the channel is (the amusing factor, as separate from the chess content)
• a rating on how instructive the channel is (based on chess learning)
• how many videos they've uploaded in February
• when was the last time they uploaded a video
• if their videos contain sponsored content (not ads that you can skip, specifically, as much as banners of chess*com and stuff like that, which is not owned by the channel owner)
• if they have click baity titles and thumbnails
• if they have only short videos or they also have long ones

Note that these are calculated on recent videos and more on a fuzzy logic. If one video out of twenty are going to have a characteristic, maybe I will count as not there. Based on these criteria I've devised a score that functions like this:

• 1 if the content is English
• 1 if they have more than ten thousand subscribers
• 2 if they feature some professional content
• 1 if they analyse their own games
• 1 if they analyse other people's games
• 2 for chess theory
• 2 if they don't use exclusively AI for the audio or video
• 1 if it's a personal channel
• 1 for human face
• 3 for high instructive chess
• 2 for high entertainment value
• 2 points for having more than 2 videos in February
• 1 point for having less than 15 videos in February
• 10 for content this year
• 3 for no sponsored labels on the video
• 3 for normal titles and thumbnails
• the country of origin and length of videos are just informational

State of chess and finding chess content

Before I reveal the results, a small detour. Google/YouTube search was AWFUL! It probably only found the channels that had paid for promotion. I went so far as the 20th Google page to create this list and the vast majority of the people that I had added manually were not even there! Meanwhile Top Chess was everywhere, which to be honest, isn't even a real chess channel. I tried Grok and ChatGPT and I got slightly better results, with Gotham first place (ChatGPT even helpfully informed me that his real name is Andrew Tang), Agadmator, Fins, Danya and Hanging Pawns being the common names in the list.

Also, I was sad to see some people I really enjoyed watching doing less and less and more rarely than before. Some even gave up completely. Such is life, but I miss those guys.

So believe you me, going on Reddit, searching on Google or asking some AI about this kind of stuff is much worse than actually caring about the game and looking for the interesting people yourself.

Results

OK, based on the totally arbitrary system above, these are the winners:

Third place:

• Hanging Pawns (Stjepan Tomic) - Croatia - 252K subs
• Loris Tavernier - Liechtenstein - 1K subs
• Silicon Road (Matthew Sadler) - UK - 7K subs
• Chess Vibes (Nelson Lopez) - US - 591K subs

Second place:

• Big Mio (Miodrag Perunovic) - Serbia - 33K subs
• KingsCrusher (Tryfon Gavriel) - UK - 120K subs
• Irina Krush - US - 25K subs
• PowerPlayChess - Daniel King - 110K subs

First place:

• Arturs Neikšāns - Latvia - 20K subs
• William Graif- US - 7K subs

Considering I am the one choosing the fitness function, it's not unexpected, but GambitMan - the same guy I pegged as the best chess YouTuber two years ago, is still first place! Initially I've put a lot of points on high level chess and instructive content, so I tweaked the parameters a little bit with smaller values, but the winners were the same! And I am sorry, but I have no sympathy for click bait and sponsor paid subscribers.

Compare the subscriptions to these channels as compared to the ones that have the most followers:

• GothamChess - 6M subs
• GMHikaru - 2.8M subs
• BotezLive - 1.8M subs
• ChessTalk - 1.7M subs
• AnnaCramling - 1.5M subs

The most active by numbers of videos in February are:

• agadmator
• GMHikaru
• GMBenjaminFinegold
• ChessBootCamp
• ChessNetwork

It's a little bit unfair to them to have deducted a point for being TOO active, but I believe having to watch a chess video a day from the same person just to keep up is a bit too much. I guess penalizing people for no content in 2025 that hard is also unfair, but there is no way to determine if someone gave up or just likes to upload a video a year.

I am saving this Excel here: YouTubers2025.xslx, so you can alter the values and maybe get something else.

P.S. at the end of the file there is a list of 7 names that I had to exclude for various reasons: dead channels, not active enough, very few total videos, focusing on their chess platform rather than chess itself or not being the ones creating the content, like it's the case of Magnus himself. No blame there, he doesn't have time for stuff like that, but still.

Conclusion

I wanted to go for a more data driven approach, but the evaluations for various parameters were as subjective as before. I am pretty sure that the people at the end got screwed over because I got tired, so I encourage you to find the winners based on your own evaluations and fitness functions.

In a better world, I could have just listed the ones I like more, but in reality I don't follow most of the people in the first places because their content is going above my stupid head.

Hope you got something out of this. Cheers!

  John Higgs is a fool. Well educated and researched, but a fool nonetheless. In The Future Starts Here: An Optimistic Guide to What Comes Next he attempts to portray an optimistic vision of the future, but comes off as unconvinced himself. The main chapters of the book feel separated and often contradict each other. And that's sad, because some of the information and ideas presented are really interesting.

  You've seen this type of book before: it starts with research and interviews, then it's compiled into a documentary style narrative that is skewed towards a particular idea. This one is trying to say that the future is not as bleak as we make it out to be, that technology has the potential to enrich our lives if we are careful with what we choose to do with it, that the environment has the potential to recover and thrive if we choose to be mindful of it, that we can escape the trappings of the capitalist mediated dystopia that everybody delights in being terrified of and that young generations of people are trending towards empathy and awareness. You get the gist: things will be better if we make them so, even if the author himself seems to lose faith in humanity as a whole a lot of the times.

  The problem arises when Higgs starts contradicting himself or using some really cherry-picked examples that he doesn't often understand. The first chapter tells of how we can't build a bright future without imagining it and that media today is biased strongly towards the negative, including fiction with its many dystopian visions. We should be focused on truth and hope. A strong start. But then he starts talking about artificial intelligence, of which he understands little, showing a strong humanistic bias and bringing Penrose's quantum microtubules intelligence as a hopeful argument, obliterating his previous points.

  He talks about the neurological effects of stuff like watching the (terrible and uninformative) news, using social media and being exposed to advertising, how it changes us in ways I didn't think of before. Strong chapter. Until he starts talking about how individualism is bad and the new youngster trend of seeing each other as part of a network is the hopeful future. Only "network" and "friendship group" are just modern terms for "tribe", yet another way in which social interaction and belonging uses the same oxytocin mechanism he described in detail and warned about just a chapter before.

  Then he goes on and on about how the new generations - which he blissfully describes from a purely Western liberal perspective, ignoring all of the silent unmediated youngsters he forgets exist - are focused on emotional well being, awareness of their environment, capable of holding multiple contradicting ideas in their head and using the one that works best, like that's something new and positive. But then he talks of how intransigent these new hopefuls are with any ideas that are not about emotional well being, environment awareness or contradicting the handful of ideas they use to shield themselves from actual truth. And then, to top it off, speaks highly of the Greatest Generation and hopes this new one, coming from the 2008 economic crisis, will be similarly practical and emotionally grounded.

  But it's the ending that makes it all feel very funny. Funnier than a book about an optimistic future published early 2019, that is. The author concludes that people find meaning in their immediate unmediated interactions with other people and reveals that, in writing this book, he "experimented" by only presenting information from people he personally knows and met. He wanted to test the idea that your direct connections are more meaningful than any exhaustive research through impersonal papers or news items.

  Bottom line, he artificially constrained himself in a bubble, wrote several small papers on various future related subjects, then bundled them all in a book that manages to contradict itself about almost every major point made.

However, to focus on truth and hope, there is a way to enjoy this book in the spirit it was written in. You have to consider it as a conversation with a random guy. You don't have expectations of journalistic objectivity and scientific research when you talk to other people. You take what they say with a grain of salt, you pick and choose which parts of their discourse is interesting, useful or entertaining, and you have a pleasant time. If you do that with this book, you can learn some really interesting tidbits from what is basically a guy rambling.

  The Englund Gambit is a weird opening that at first seems a one trick pony, something that either gets your opponent with a cheap shot or fails miserably. But when you look closer, you see it as a functional opening with a high win rate for Black, something chess experts have spent hours of content refuting and also, if I may, one of the funnier jokes in chess.

  You see, the joke starts from its very name. Fritz Englund did not play this opening. He was a very good chess player from the beginning of the 20th century and in 1932, just a year before his death, he organized a chess tournament where the opening moves were 1. d4 e5 2. dxe5 Nc6 3. Nf3 Qe7 4. Qd5, what we now call the Stockholm Variation of the Englund Gambit, because of this very tournament and it's not even considered the main line.

  I don't know why he chose these moves, but I feel like he tried for the more unprincipled opening out there. That's how the joke continues. You sacrifice the important center king pawn and then, with only one knight developed, you make multiple queen moves. From then, you either destroy your opponent immediately or are forced to run away with your queen, never castle, make moves like Kd8, Na6, Ne7, Rb8 and d6, f6, c6 - in some variations all of them. It is a positional joke, where you lose little material and sometimes you gain some, but the eval is almost always favoring your opponent.

  Yet, as funny as it is, this is not a ridiculous opening. Natural moves often lead to a quick defeat for your opponent and, even if they defend against your initial attack, it's White that has to prove they know what to do next. This turned out to be a very entertaining opening to study, as at the end, escaping after you failed to assassinate your target and fighting for survival, the game becomes really thrilling. A bit like a hitman action movie.

  Also, take a look at the popularity of this opening. It has exploded since the end of 2020 and is still played a lot today.

  In order to document myself on this opening I've created a Lichess study, complete with very detailed video explanations from experts such as Daniel Naroditsky, Miodrag Perunovic, Stjepan Tomic and Igor Smirnov, which try very hard to show you how to play against it. You can follow the videos directly from the study if you have my LiChess Tools browser extension installed and you use Chrome (Firefox does not allow that video popup functionality). I've identified six main traps from the Englund as well as some lesser played lines that give you a theoretical advantage against ill prepared opponents.

  Companion study: Englund Gambit - with videos

So let us begin.

Basics

  The opening requires just two moves: White starts with d4 and Black replies with e5, a kind of mirrored Scandinavian, but completely different because the e5 pawn, a very important one as it protects the king and controls the center, is completely undefended. The purpose of the Englund Gambit is to draw out your opponent's pieces in protection of a pawn, while the queen sneaks in and kills the king. This is the most critical position:

  It looks promising: a triple attack that White can't possibly completely protect against in a position that has been reached four million times on Lichess with a win rate for Black of 60%. Even for games 1600+ blitz+ from the last year the win rate is still unreasonable high: 55%. White has to be very careful here.

  This is not the only way you can play this opening, though. White might bring their bishop to g5, showing they know what the Englund is about, so maybe instead of the usual Qb4 change your plans by going to the very rare Qc5, confusing your opponent:

  Or maybe, guessing your opponent is prepared for your usual Englund trick, you don't even play Qe7 and instead pivot to the equally dangerous Hartlaub-Charlick Gambit, where you gambit even more pawns, but gain initiative:

  There is more than meets the eye with the Englund, far beyond the simple "mate in 8 moves" trick that people are usually emphasizing to try to sell it to you. In fact, I am not even going to mention the normal mate tricks in this blog post! You have the study available to check out any variation your heart desires. Instead, I will focus on the chase, the part where the initial attack failed and White is gleefully counterattacking and trying to punish your queen.

Going for the tricks

  This is the next critical position. You went for the tricks and White defended well. You are now woefully undeveloped and your queen has to escape from behind enemy lines. There is one more trick with Nb4 which could work, but it can be easily counteracted by White with Nd4 to which your best reply is probably Na6. It's wild stuff, but I don't recommend it.

  Instead, go for the normal Bb4 - which may look unnecessarily dangerous, but it is by far the best move. This is the punchline of the Englund joke: you are no longer down material, but the eval is +2 for White. They will viciously attack your queen with Rb1, then , after you dodge with Qa3, either go for the more recent main line with Nd5 or with the more classical Rb3.

  

  But still, there is one more trick that you can try! (you're seeing the pattern now, don't you?). The queen has no other square to escape to other than a3, everything else is covered by rook, knight and pawns. What else could you do? Enter the Hambleton Gambit, the variation that Aman Hambleton of Chessbrah fame popularized: Qxc3!?. You exchange your wayward queen for two of White's more active pieces and a pawn, but you only lose less than one more eval point. You might say that you reconcile the material with the positional evaluation, reaching a position where you are 2 material points down with close to +3 eval for White.

  It's an amazing idea, but one that I am not confident enough to recommend. Aman himself played it a lot and created a lot of theory around it, kudos to him. He even played it in an official over the board tournament and only lost in a completely drawn position after more than a hundred moves being played. This is one of those variations where the opponent will get humiliated by a draw, but it's very difficult to play for a win.

  Anyway, let's get back to the Qa3 idea. Let's see what White wants to achieve:

  OK, a bit overwhelming, but that's what the position is. They will exchange the bishops then attack with two monstruous knights a Black king that was abandoned by its defenders. In view of this diagram, Hambleton's idea doesn't look so bad at all.

  Yet, there is one more trick. Who'd have thunk it? Indeed, it's a silly trick, but glorious when it works: 8. Nd5 Ba5 . We delay the exchange of bishops and also defend c7, giving White another opportunity to blunder by taking the bishop themselves. That move leads to the exchange of bishops and queens, with one of the knights retreating to protect the White king and giving Black the time to play Kd8.

  But that's not the trick, because a well studied White player will not capture on a5 and instead play 8. Rb5 to which we reply with Bxd2+. Why is exchanging the bishops good now? Well, first because there is no way to defend it and c7 and all of the other weaknesses White is attacking, but second because we're setting the last trap with Kd8, defending c7 and enticing White to give a check instead of playing one of the principled moves:

  There are three moves that White can make here, two of them are maintaining the (large) advantage and one is either equalizing or even losing. Best move is e4, opening the light bishop diagonal, but also providing an escape square for the king. Ng5 is the next best move, making it extremely difficult to protect both c7 and f7. The next move, a very natural move, is Qg5+, checking the king and also attacking g7. Oh how the tables have turned!

  Now White's queen is in your face, capturing your rook, and there is nothing you can do in order to protect it... 12... Qc1# That's the trick. There are tricks all the way down, young one!

The Siderite Variation

  OK, I am kidding. I have not invented a variation in the Englund Gambit, but I did find one that is reasonable for Black, extremely rarely played, and one of those weapons that good hitmen always hide in their hair or belt or whatever. So you have gauged your opponent and reached the conclusion they know what they are doing. Maybe you are playing the same person who you mercilessly tricked before in the Englund, again and again and again. He has come prepared and hungry for your blood. 1. d4 e5 2. dxe5 Nc6 3. Nf3 Qe7 4. Bg5 this guy has watched the beginning of Danya's video and is ready to pounce when you move Qb4+. He can see himself finally win. And you play 4...Qc5.

  Note that you can reach the same position if you go Qb4+ and he replies with Bd2 first. Then you go Qc5. The idea here is mostly psychological. The best move for White is to move the bishop, again, maybe for the third time in a row, to e3. There are other similarly good moves, don't kid yourself; objectively the Englund Gambit is not a sound opening, but when you play against people, you use their very instincts against them. So here we are, the last critical position I am going to present:

  There are no tricks from this position, really. Now you play chess and you prove you're better than your opponent. From the four moves White can do that don't lead to equality, one is retreating the most advanced piece that they just moved and the other three are apparently abandoning the e5 pawn. Engines are recommending Qe7, often followed by Qe6. Who can understand engines? Qc5, played in 1% of the games that have reached the position, reaches into your opponent's heart and tears their soul out.

  Your plan? Other than confusing the hell out of the other guy? Ne7 (not Nf6, running into b4 moves that Big Mio and Danya are recommending), followed by Ng6, perhaps. If they protect their pawn with Bf4, you can move your queen to b4, playing for a threefold repetition or maybe going for the tricks once again. And even if all else fails, even if your opponent plays the best moves and you get to the position recommended by the masters, eval is +1.7, you nicely move Qe6, finally appeasing the electronic gods, and you reach a position that has been played 6 times and from which Black won 5 times.

Conclusion

Most of the work for this post was the study, which I encourage you to examine carefully. Not for my recommendations in particular, because I am not that good of a chess player, but the multiple lines that provide a lot of entertainment. I have to admit I started this with the idea of finding some quick trick line that will catch your opponent unawares and I've spent instead most of a week looking into the beauty of this rich gambit and losing myself into analysis.

Whatever kind of player you are, I hope you will find this as useful and entertaining as possible. Enjoy!

  If I had to use one word to describe Three Axes to Fall it would be: lazy. The title is lazy, as it has no connection to the content. It only gets worse from there. The characterization is lazy, the same repetition used ... repeatedly... to convey emotional depth, the random characters doing random stuff just in the nick of time, the relationships started haphazardly and ended stupidly or not at all the inept enemies that have a lot of power and do nothing with it except boast and bluster, even the book cover is lazy. But the worst part is Sam Sykes was too lazy to finish the story or even remember why he started it.

  Remember Sal? The woman so brutally betrayed that she wants to burn the world to get revenge? Sam doesn't. In the first book she was an angry, driven, asshole who could spare no quarter for anything that wouldn't further her deadly goals. I liked her then. She was smart and surprisingly funny. In the second book she was turned for no actual reason from an anti hero to a tragic hero, a repentant protector who kills tens of people with her sword in a single fight and still keeps running. In this third book she is a tired, exhausted, fleeing person who thinks about things, reflects a lot and whines the entire book, until she forgets who she is and stumbles into being a messianic savior surrounded by a fast and furious family.

  Now imagine John Wick, hunting for the people who killed his dog, the only living thing reminding him of his dead wife, and then somehow deciding he wants to do something else and start a hobby, finding forgiveness in his heart. It's almost that bad. I could have forgiven (heh!) this book if it were half as short and ended prematurely because the writer died. But no, it's just a lazy, half-assed non-ending that leads to nothing except a long final chapter in which people part ways smiling wisely and wearily after doing fuck all the entire book.

  You want to know what happened to her magic? Nope. You wondered why her list grew from what seemed like a short one in the first book to more than thirty names? Nope. You frustrated she barely started on that list before she let it go? Who cares? How about the frenemies she made, who grew along with her trying to kill her, like Velline and Tretta? Nah! Want to know where the gun gets its bullets anymore when Liette is not around? Bah! This goes on and on and on.

  Bottom line: a captivating book lost its way in the sequel and collapsed in the third, with no meaningful closure or payoff for reading through 2500 pages of story.

  The first book in the Grave of Empires series felt refreshing. A new magical steam punk world, an interesting roguish hero and entertaining fantasy adventures. I needed that, for some reason. Yet reading the second book, Ten Arrows of Iron, filled me with disappointment. It's not a bad book by itself, it's just so much less good than the first.

  First of all, it's basically a heist story, a genre that I despise with all my heart. But even without that, it's inconsistent, repetitive, lazy. There are even some scenes where Sal oscillates between having no weapons, using a sword and an axe that she lost in a previous scene. A lot more characters have been added, while the ones in the first book were eliminated or sidelined, yet all of these new characters are almost cardboard, doing stuff that's in their character sheet, but for reasons often not consistent with previous behavior and that feel artificial.

  Yes, the scope of the battles is huge, the threats are cosmic, the body count horrendous, the romantic angles multiplied and pumped up, but I felt almost nothing as Sal just went through the motions, one moment hurt and exhausted, the next killing hundreds of people with a sword and a gun, the next flirting with the people who want to kill her. The writing is using the same formulas that worked in the first book, but repeated again and again, until they lose their strength. And so many things just happen because they have to happen. The last scene, where she randomly finds a guy in a tent on the road she was randomly travelling on was soo bad!

  But I feel the worst transgression was that Sam Sykes changed the character of Sal the Cacophony from a damaged person seeking revenge at all costs to an anti-hero, who is kind and thoughtful and ultimately good, only misunderstood while she kills whole communities. I had no need of that. The original single-minded character who sometimes did something good by mistake was enough for me.

  Bottom line is that I hope the character can be salvaged in the third book, but I fear it might not happen. Falling in love with your own character is a sure way to ruin them.

  While the Philidor Defense has fallen out of favor for not being ambitious enough, it is one of the oldest and most played openings for Black. So one might forgive you for thinking the theory for it is well known, yet it is still played now and has 45% winning chances for Black. In this post I will describe a weapon that will utterly crush your Philidor opponent with seemingly crazy moves that nevertheless never leave White at a disadvantage. In fact, from the critical position of this gambit, less than 3% of people play the correct move with White, meaning it's something of a novelty your opponents won't be prepared for.

  Meet the Zombie King gambit, an opening named and popularized by YouTuber Adamisko šach. It arises from natural moves on both sides (the losing move for Black is even considered good at low engine depths): 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 d6 reaches the Philidor defense. We reply with 3. Bc4 and they have to go 3...h6, which is the most played move in the position. From there we attack the center with 4. d4, they take, most common and best move 4...exd4 to which we replay with 5. c3, gambitting a pawn. We have reached the critical position.

  From here, only two moves are worth taking into consideration: 5...dxc3, by far the most played in 65% of the cases, and 5...Nf6, played in 15% of the cases. The first one is a blunder that accepts the Zombie King gambit and leads to most satisfying continuations, the second one we will consider declining the gambit, in which we just capture back the d-pawn and we go either Bd3 or Qb3, depending on whether Black captures the e-pawn or not, then play normal chess.

Now, the Zombie King gets activated when Black greedily captures the c3 pawn. Having hyped it so much, you know that the next moves will not be mild and positional , so we follow 5...dxc3 with 6. Bxf7!! Black has no other reasonable options than to eat the bishop, hence the name of the gambit. The Black zombified king will mindlessly eat our pieces until finally getting decapitated.

From this position, only three moves don't lead to mate. From those, one of them is giving up the queen, the other is giving up the rook. Most played move, Ke8, leads to mate in 3 after Qh5+ and  Qf7#, and has been played in 40% of cases. The most challenging (and still badly losing) response from Black is 7...Kf6, to which we respond with 8. Qf3+, feeding the king one more piece, then 9. Qf7, cutting off any escape.

In this position, Black has +7 points of material: a pawn, a bishop and a knight. The Stockfish eval is +2.5 for White! Four moves don't lead to mate from here: two of them just give up the queen outright, another is cutting off the e7-b3 diagonal for our queen, giving back all material while the king runs away in shame all over the board, while the last one, the best, is the one that maintains the +2.5 eval: 9...Nf6.

Now whichever move we respond with: 10. f4+ (recommended by the engines) or 10. Nxc3 (which is still good and leads to funnier lines), Black is lost. Remember that this is after they played the best possible moves after Bxf7+. And look at the Black's position! The only pieces that are developed are a knight and the king. This opening is another reminder that it doesn't matter how many pieces you have, but how many you can use.

Feel free to explore all the possibilities with the Zombie King Gambit study on Lichess (the LiChess Tools browser extension is recommended to be installed, but it works without it, as well).

Here is the video Adamisko made for the same gambit:
[youtube:ZpDaO0ZfVso]

  One day Sam Sykes woke up and said to Diana Gabaldon: "Mom! I can write a lot of huge fantasy books, too!". I like his writing, so this is good, but Seven Blades in Black, the first book in the Grave of Empires series, is a 700 page book, which is bad. It was a very entertaining and captivating story, which is good, but it ended 90% there, which is bad. Still less than the 850 pages of the first Outlander book, which is good. Just wanted to end things on a good note, so that it will never be said that Siderite is not graciously optimistic. And handsome.

  Weird paragraph? That's kind of the vibe of the book. The story is about a mysterious bounty hunter with a strange magical gun, who is looking for seven mages to kill. As the story progresses we get world building, action, magic, death, friendship, romance and a slow explanation of what the hell this was all about. Since it's one of those books where the main character is telling her story to another character, it's written in the first person, which gives it a bit more humor, as Sal is both cocky and possibly an unreliable narrator. I did get a bit of The Usual Suspects while reading, but it's not quite like that.

  I liked the story, I liked the world, with the two magical vs technological groups that both boldly claim to fight for peace and stability while destroying everything in their path with their pointless battles. I thought the romantic angles were kind of strained, to be honest. The ending is almost satisfying, but it ends on a weird vibe, with still some stuff to be resolved. It felt like an artificial cliffhanger: read my next book! Funny thing is that it worked. I plan to read the next book in the series next, but it's going to hurt my rating of the book.

  Bottom line: if you like the classic likeable rogue trope, the grandiose adventures and fast action in an almost steampunk world that is both alien and similar to our own, then you will like this.

  In The Horror from the Hills - which is quite a silly name, because not much happens on the hills to begin with - an archeologist brings back to America the statue of an ancient malevolent god. Well, it doesn't bode well, I can tell you that. It's published in 1963, but it feels written decades earlier. I thought maybe it was an artistic choice, but no, it was actually published prior in 1931 in a serialized form. In Weird Tales! Remember those?

  A Lovecraftian story, it features the usual high class gentlemen whose passion is knowledge and science, talking very convincingly in archaic pompous terms and being very sensitive to how things ought to be and are not. They kind of bring a sleeping god in the U.S. and, feeling bad about it, strive to save the world. It made me feel nostalgic for the eras where science and rational thought would solve problems in stories. Well, they do solve it with a death ray, basically a sci-fi bazooka, but Frank Belknap Long is an American author, so it tracks.

  Did I like the book? It was strange, like Lovecraftian mythos books usually are, but also weirdly progressive. There is an entire scene where a policeman explains how he is going to solve the crime by finding a Chinaman, spewing all kinds of ridiculously false preconceptions that the main character is disgusted with. And while people are often repulsed, offended or otherwise unwilling to put horrible things into words, the book just feels old, not laughable.

  Funny enough, apparently this is an H.P.Lovecraft story, or rather a dream that he recounted to Long, which then published it with Lovecraft's permission almost word for word. Poor Frank wrote all kinds of stuff for decades, but what he is most known for are short stories in the Lovecraft universe. I do not mind that, to be honest.

  Bottom line: a fine short story to bring you back to an age where things were very different and remind you that whatever nonsense bothers you today, it shall pass like all things do.

  I had no idea there were so many games in the Alien universe, 61 so far, starting from 1982! Like four games for every movie, although that also counts expansions of existing games. The fact that they have very similar names doesn't help. And these are the official games. There is an Alien based board game from 1979! Age 7+ LOL! Gotta love the '70s!

  Aliens vs. Predator 2010 is visually impressive, but it's basically a first person shooter. And you don't feel any satisfaction in terms of story, except when playing the Marine. I actually played the original AvP game, the one with the ridiculous graphics from 1993 - at least I think it was that one, it was a long time ago. Anyway, that game made you feel different when playing the various species: you got the special field of view of the alien, the speed and wall crawling, the almost sensual way in which it would embrace its victims, relish in their terror, then bite their heads off. You can probably guess that was my favorite to play. Anyway, this is lacking from this game. 17 years later the story and visuals are amazing, the actual feel is gone. A personal peeve of mine.

  The story is another Weyland-Yutani installation that is overrun by xenomorphs, you have to escape from and that explodes at the end. This Weyland guy sucks when it comes to work safety, huh? Anyway, I liked that it kind of explained what happened with Karl Bishop Weyland. Spoilers: he had cancer, so he uploaded himself into androids. In a lot of games you meet Weylands that seem to be the real deal, only to shoot them and see them bleed white, but you assume that there is a real one somewhere. Well, it's bishops all the way down.

  There are also audio logs that show the drive of the guy. He's basically Elon Musk, wanting to achieve maximum progress, profit and immortality.  One of them says "Obsession is the only path to progress. We forgive many things to great men, as long as they achieve their goals". It's true. It's the role of the rebel scapegoat who can either save the system when it gets too complacent and its decaying, or fail and be blamed for it. Ha! I finally understand The Architect from Matrix! Rebels are not outside the system, they are its safeguards.

  Anyway, the sets were nice. There were even jungle arenas, which made for interesting visuals of aliens jumping and walking on trees. However, I decry the lack of exploration of the concept. All the species in the jungle should be infestable, right? What about plants? How would xenomorphs adapt to and then change a fully functional ecosystem? There were fatality-like kills, even if some were kind of reused for the xenomorphs and predators, which looked nice, but got old fast. And the only alien thing I liked is when it held its victims for face huggers, almost caringly.

  Bottom line: an interesting foray into the combined Alien and Predator universe. Personally I think combining them was dumb, but we're there already, so let's hope for the best. The story itself is not very complicated, this being a shooter and all, but all the gameplay and cinematics combined made for an entertaining movie.

  Ask and you shall receive. I was complaining of Alien: Stasis Interrupted about how the game switched from a claustrophobic survival game to a shooter. Then I watched Alien: Isolation, all the cinematics. A whooping five hours of it. And the entire game is about trying to survive! In truth, there is little difference between the gameplay and the cinematics, but the video was of all the actions required to finish the game in order and done perfectly, so I consider it a film.

  The main character is Amanda Ripley. Hey! Ripley is that woman from the first movie! Anyway, that's her daughter, still trying to find her mother when the flight recorder from the Nostromo is reported found. They go to the space station Sevastopol, where the ship that found the recorder - and also made a quick stop on LV-429, is docked.

  I loved that there is just one alien in the first half. In fact, I decry adding more of them later. But the beginning is great, with an alien that is murderous, cunning and unstoppable. There are also crazed androids, paranoid people and a lot of retro looking equipment like tape recorders and big hard electrical switches and hand-made weaponry towards the end.

  In Isolation, the enemy is not really the alien - well, one might argue that this is the general theme of Alien - but the humans and their smallmindedness. One motivated person almost fixes the entire station while evading aliens and synths, so imagine what all the people on the station could have achieved if they worked together, not selfishly thinking just of themselves. This idea is very strong in the game.

  This may be the most satisfying game entry in the Alien universe. And of course, being the most cinematic, the scariest, the one with the least shooting and the most difficult to finish, people meh-ed it. Anyway, I liked it a lot.