After playing the second campaign in the Starcraft II game, the Zerg one, I have to say that I wasn't terribly impressed. 27 missions in all, nothing very fancy, and a linear script that involves only Kerrigan getting stronger and going after Mengsk. The only delight here was the character of Abathur, the Zerg "scientist", who speaks like that Korean doctor in Monday Mornings and his only concern is to find new strands of evolution for the swarm. Kerrigan, even if her voice was that of Tricia Helfer, is a cardboard character who acts arrogantly like a queen (well, she is one) taking about vision and cunning, but acting impulsively and in a direct manner most of the time. She is the character I was playing, so that is probably why I didn't really enjoy the story so much. Mark my words, if you want to find the funny moments in the game, just click on Abathur whenever you can.

There were some nice surprises in the game, though, like when destroying a neutral vehicle on a map and receiving a communication from a human soldier complaining he just paid for that car. A huge game, made with people from three continents, SCII must appease the masses to pay for itself, therefore the script could not have been too complex. They also concentrated on the multiplayer action, not on the storymode one plays on Casual difficulty in order to see the "movie", but still... a good script and a captivating story could have brought millions more into the fold, so to speak. The Starcraft universe is, after all, a very interesting one, describing the interactions between three interstellar cultures (four, if you consider the Xel'Naga). The potential here is immense, with books and movies to keep people interested for generations.

I liked the concept of evolution missions. You see, Abathur had the ability to alter strains of units and gave you two choices which were mutually exclusive. But before you chose, you had to play two mini-missions that showed the different strains in action. You usually had to kill some indigenous lifeform, absorb its essence and integrate it into your creatures. Also in the game there was a creature called an Infestor, which, judging by how the Terran campaign went, you will not see it in the multiplayer game. It allowed you to capture any enemy unit, except the heroic ones. Pretty fun. One of the evolution missions gave you the ability to morph hydralisks to lurkers, one of my favourite units from the old Starcraft game.

Overall I enjoyed playing the campaign, even if I felt that it could have been a lot greater. Finished it in about 10 hours, too. Of course, it would have taken a lot longer if I hadn't played on the easiest difficulty, but I didn't have a mouse and I really was only interested in the story. Unfortunately, I didn't feel like I gained much by playing the campaign as opposed to watching all the cinematics one after the other on YouTube, and that is, probably, what bothered me most.

So here is a compilation of Abathur dialogs.

Your Inner Fish is a very nice book, popularizing the science behind paleontology and anatomy and making a surprising and thorough connection between the two. In short, Neil Shubin describes the way bodies are built and how our ancestry, from single cell organisms, fish, amphibians to primates, influences our design. It is a rather short book, and also easy to read. From field stories of discovering fossils in the wild to the anatomy classes that he teaches in university, the pages take one through a journey of true discovery and makes us understand so easily some things that very few people consider simple.

I could review Your Inner Fish for you, but someone did a lot more effort of it here. Also, the University of California Television YouTube channel released a one hour video presentation of the book which I am attaching to this blog post, as well as what seems to be the book's Facebook page. What I can say is that I liked the book a lot and I recommend it to everybody, science minded people or not.

Update: I recognized the voice of Brad Dourif as Piero (how can one not?) so I went to see who the other voice actors were. If you, like me, felt a strange attraction to Callista Curnow, that's because her voice is that of gorgeous Lena Headey. Also you might recognize Susan Sarandon as Granny Rags (hee hee!) or John Slattery as Admiral Havelock. But pretty much no one comes close to Brad Dourif, except perhaps Roger Jackson, who is the voice of Mojo-Jojo!

As you may know, I am a great fan of Arkane Studios games. They did Ultima Underworld, Arx Fatalis, Might and Magic X (which for all intents and purposes was Arx Fatalis 2) and now they did Dishonored. You will probably say that Ultima Underworld was actually a Looking Glass Studios game, but when they dissolved, some people from their team went on to work for Arkane and the resemblance of the games is pretty obvious. Anyway, I am now in a small village in Italy and only have Internet at my work. Imagine my great surprise when I discovered a kit of the Dishonored game on my laptop. I immediately installed it and played the game for a non stop 20 hours until I finished it. However, it was my desire to see the entire story (and to get some sleep in the weekend) that made me finish so quickly. You see, the game is a first person shooter-adventure that follows a storyline. However, on each stage you can explore and find a lot of secrets and side quests and even influence the story a little bit through your actions. The universe in which the game is played is a wonderfully crafted steampunk world, driven by whale oil and technology invented by mad scientists and filled with political intrigue. I can safely say that the game is a combination of Arx Fatalis, Thief/Assassin's Creed and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.

For an analysis of the game, there are a lot of things to be said. One of them is that the 3D world was, as far as I could see, almost perfect. I didn't get stuck in some fold of the wireframe, I didn't reach places I shouldn't have reached even when having the power to Blink, I didn't see through textures or seen any major bugs, actually. The game is a huge collaboration of companies, with people from all over the world, they could have screwed up anywhere: design, storyline, sound bits, software, 3D world, etc. It did not happen. You can also see the love that was poured into the game when the story does not end with an obvious finish, but continues on for a few stages. They could have worked less for the same money, but they somehow chose not to.

The gameplay is a joy. You have different ways of solving problems: you can kill anything that moves, you can choose to not kill them, but perform a chokehold on them and hide their unconscious bodies so you can avoid detection or you can go on high ledges and sneaky paths to avoid conflict all together. An interesting component of the story is The Outsider a supernatural being, probably a god, that looks like a normal guy, dressed normally for the age, but having black eyes. He is treated as the Devil in the official religion of the country, but he acts like your ally in the game. His only obvious interest is to have fun watching the chaos. For these purposes he gives you his mark and the gift of magic, which allows you to teleport, possess small animals and humans, summon a pack of ravenous pack of rats to devour your enemies and other fun things like that. The world if very interactive. You can, for example, take a random item like a bottle and throw it away. This would either unbalance your enemy, if you hit them directly, so you can deliver a deadly sword strike, or cause them to go to investigate the noise of the bottle breaking. One interesting option is to take the head of the enemy you have just beheaded and throw it into another opponent. Each level had hidden magical artifacts which you can find using a special Outsider device, a living heart with mechanical bits which you hold in your hand and that talks to you - told you, fun stuff. This usually prompts you to go out of your way to find said artifacts. The complexity of each stage is staggering. The first two stages I tried to play as completely as possible, which took me a lot of hours. After the first level ended I felt pretty good about myself. I had explored a lot of the map and I felt pretty smug about it. In the final summary of the mission I saw, to my chagrin, that I had found about half of all the valuable objects that I could have found. The rest of the missions I just breezed through, in order to see the ending. If I would have played this game as thoroughly as I possibly could, it would probably have accounted for many tens of hours of gameplay. Well, maybe it's me, but emergent gameplay is the coolest thing since fire was invented.

The devices you possess are old school enough to be a lot less effective than magic. You have your trusted one bullet pistol, which you must reload after each firing, you have your crossbow, which can fire darts, sleep darts or incendiary bolts, you have delicious bombs which, when triggered, fire a fast winding metal wire that cuts your enemies to pieces, grenades are always fun, and so on.

There are some issues which I had with the game though. It seemed to me that the magical spells were rather unbalanced. I cannot tell you how much they are unbalanced until I play the game again in another way, but it seemed to me that you absolutely needed to have Blink and Dark Vision and that the best offensive spell was the summoning of the rat pack. The rest were almost useless, at least by description: something that allows you to attack stronger and more enemies at once if you have enough adrenaline, something that allows you to possess animals, but there aren't that many animals in the game, and only partial possession of people, something that causes a gust of strong wind. Well, I will try them soon so I can tell you more in an update. Another thing that felt useless to me were the bone charms who gave me stuff that didn't really seem important. I did play the game on Easy, since I didn't have a mouse for the laptop, so that may explain my disdain of the things.

It is important to realize that the game has downloadable missions and content through Steam. This means the story can go on. I intend to explore this avenue. Also, after playing a second time I have to say that I was amazed of the option to not kill anyone the entire game. Even the assassination missions have ways of getting rid of the characters without killing them (even if their fates are usually worst than death). If you want to go that way, please always check that the unconscious victim is actually unconscious. Otherwise you end the mission with one or two dead people and there is no going back. One example is if you choke one guy, then let it fall with the head in the water. He dies even if you immediately remove him.

All in all I cannot recommend the game enough. Add to this that after you buy it, you also get extra chapters as downloadable content and, who knows, maybe they will allow the community to make their own chapters. It was just fantastic. Go play it!

I embed here an example gameplay from someone who is obviously more skilled than I am.

I have been hearing about the AngularJS library for a few months now, people often praising it as the new paradigm of web development. It is basically a JavaScript MVC framework that makes heavy use of markup language in order to declare the desired behaviour. Invented at Google by Miško Hevery, it uses cacheable templates, databinding and dependency injection to combine the various components that otherwise are independent and testable. It also comes with its own testing framework (unit and end-to-end) and a way to describe unit tests Jasmine (BDD)style.

So I started reading about this new framework in the book intuitively called AngularJS, written by Brad Green and Shyam Seshadri. They start with an anecdote, discussing how they were working on a web application at Google. They have already written 17000 lines of code in about 6 months and it was almost finished, albeit with great frustration related to development speed and testability. This guy, Miško Hevery, tells everyone that by using a framework that he wrote in his spare time (you gotta love devs!) they could rewrite the whole application in two weeks. He was wrong, they did it in three weeks and at the end the whole thing has only 1500 lines of code and was fully testable. This was a great beginning for the book, as it starts with a promise and then (sorry, couldn't help the pun - you will see what I mean if you read the book or know AngularJS already) it describes how to achieve your goals. The book itself is not large, about 160 PDF pages, and can be used as both a primer and a reference. It describes the basic concepts of AngularJS and how they can be put to work, with some small app examples at the end. Of course, you have a link to where to download all their code samples.

What do I think about the book? It was pretty good. It shows the authors' preference towards Linux setups, but it is not annoying. Each chapter is clear and to the point. The framework itself, though, is original enough that after a few chapters it is almost impossible to understand everything without tinkering with the code yourself. Unfortunately I didn't have the time and disposition to do that, so just because I've read the book doesn't mean I know how to work with Angular, but I am confident that when I will actually start working with it, it will all come together in my mind. Also, as I was saying, the book can easily be used as a reference. It is not a complete overview, not every AngularJS feature and gotcha can be found in its pages, but it's good enough.

What do I think about the framework? It seems pretty spectacular. My only experience with JavaScript MVC frameworks is from a short brush off with BackboneJS. At a time I thought I would be working with it a lot and was boasting here that interesting posts would appear. Alas, it was not to be. Sorry about that, maybe better luck with Angular. Backbone was pretty interesting, but it had a horrendous way of working with data models and it was very easy to break something and not realize where it came from. There seems to be a lot more thought put into Angular. An interesting point is that the writers advertise TDD as a way of actually working and claim they do so themselves. I have seen many people trying and giving up, but I have hopes for JavaScript. You don't need to compile things, you don't need complicated servers or time consuming deployment steps: just change stuff and run the tests and/or refresh a page. I like the fact that the creators of AngularJS put this much work into making everything testable.

So go ahead: read the book and try the framework!

Update 24 Aug 2013: I've started reading dev blogs again and I've stumbled upon a 70 minute video by Dan Wahlin presenting AngularJS. His explanations seemed a lot more down to Earth than those in the book so I felt that his video really complements rather well what is written there. Here it is:

I have very fond memories of the games Star Control and Star Control 2, played on my PC when I was but a wee boy. They were DOS games released in 1990 and 1992, respectively, and were absolutely marvellous: large universes, with many star systems, each of them with planets and moons; many alien species which were strange and funny and obnoxious; storylines that were both absurd and very captivating. I had a great time.

I want to open a parenthesis here and talk about the quality of games back then. Click here to hide the following rant, if you are not in the mood for it. I really have no idea how the PC game market was working in the US, but here in Romania, there were very few PCs, no Internet and the distribution of games (all pirated) was done via friends who would recommend and share what they thought was great. There were no walkthroughs, rarely any printed maps or special instructions (since they were not original games) and the only way to finish up a game was to actually play it. Sometimes it got frustrating enough that after hours of trying to find something, you would call friends and ask them what they did. I can only imagine that even in a country were they were a lot more computers and games were bought, rather than copied, the game play situation was similar. In other words, the relationship to the game played was personal: someone that you know and respect came to you and recommended the game. This was the only thing that made you play it other than seeing the cover in some window and feeling like you have to try it. Also, not having any Internet (or very little on it), you would not have access to many reviews and neither to game updates, if something was wrong in the game. And you also have to think of the state of affairs in software programming: every software firm was basically a gang of enthusiasts inventing and trying their own way in which to build software.

Yet, a lot of the games back then were great. Not all, maybe not most, but certainly the ones reaching me through "the grapevine", probably because the bad ones would be filtered away. One has to ask oneself how games back then required a number of hours of play orders of magnitude larger than present ones. How their stories had the complexity of movie scripts (often a lot better) and so much intricacies like alternate game modes, humour and so on. And the answer is, of course, the Internet. Once the gameplay is too complex, players swarm to online walkthroughs, often in video format, to tell them what to do. Atmospheric gameplay where one has to walk for hours to find something are considered antique and wasteful of time. And of course, if they are not social enough, they aren't even worth playing. The advertising is done via the web, with "stars" or other such whimsical method of rating a game, often resulting in simplistic orgies of graphical design with repetitive action as the only thing to do, humour provided by caricaturesque icons of birds or zombies.

That being said, as a software developer myself, I played The Ur-Quan Masters for only two days, using said walkthroughs and being nagged by the wife and dog for not spending time with them. I also had moments where I cursed the necessity to move towards a planet or a star by actually waiting until the ship got there, and often by manually controlling the craft to reach there. Also very annoying was to manually look for star names, until I downloaded the map from ... the Internet. So I am not just a geezer that hates the new, all melancholic about the past; the present has its boons... few as they are. Anyway, to the game!

In 2002, ten years after its release, the makers of Star Control 2 made released the source of the game as open source. Maybe this should be heeded by other game and software makers: create a copyright licence that voids itself ten years after the release of the software. The world would be a better place! Anyway, some people decided to port that to different platforms, including Windows. Now I know that DOS and Windows are made by the same company and that the port sounds easy, but you should look at the bugs for this port like 'Not thread safe' or 'Not safe for 64 bits' and so on.

Accidentally I found out about this port for Star Control 2, called The Ur-Quan Masters. Why was the name changed? Because even as the source code was free to use, the name was copyrighted. Weird, right? I installed the latest version (0.7.0.1 - you gotta love these open source versions that tend to reach 1.0, but never do - a bunch of perfectionists, all of them :-) ) and I couldn't start it. It threw an error no matter what I did. In their defence, I was trying to play it on an Athlon 2500+ processor running Windows XP (I know, geezer!). But I did manage to install and run version 0.6.2, which seems to be working on my machine. This is part of the motivation for writing this post, since I found no one on the Internet complaining about the same problem as me. I did try all the compatibility modes for it, BTW, and it didn't work. Maybe I should have tried running in Windows 98 (yes, I still have that installed as a secondary OS).

You see, the plot is that you are the descendant of an exploration mission that was never picked up from the planet they were supposed to investigate. They did find an ancient alien starship factory and managed to build just the skeleton of a ship to send you back to Earth to see what had happened. Getting there you find the Earth encased in an impenetrable shield with an orbiting station around it. The crew of the station tell you the story: alien race called the Ur-Quan came for enslaving all sentient races, won the war and gave earthlings two choices (well, actually three, if you consider total annihilation, but let's not get technical): join them as their slaves or relocate all resources to Earth and be trapped under the slave shield. Humans chose the latter. Now, your mission is to find alien races, make them join you in defeating the Ur-Quan and ... well, defeat the Ur-Quan. You have to do that by exploring amongst hundreds of stars, each with their own solar system of planets and moons. You get fuel and extra modules for your ship at the human station, but you need to bring materials (minerals) in order to get them. Minerals are gathered via manual missions to the surface of each planet and moon, while fires, lightning, earthquakes and alien lifeforms are attacking your landers. Aliens are diverse and most very funny: a cowardly race that speak like Italians, an evil spider race, a sexy race called the Syreen, warrior type race (that is weak and stupid), automatic probes that declare their peaceful intentions then attack you, mean spirited aliens that consider all harm done to you as a practical joke and so on. There is even an Emo race, although the term became popular a long time after the release of the game.

Oh, the memories! The vibrating music originally thought for PC speaker or maybe AdLib cards brought back feelings of old. The witty dialogues and the immersive nature of the game made me relive a lot of past pleasures. Unfortunately, as I was saying in the rant above, there was a lot of immersion that I really didn't want, like waiting for minutes to get from a star to another, then manually navigate to reach a planet or moon. I couldn't help thinking as a software developer and consider how I would have done the game - of course, online, in HTML5 and Javascript, and actually it wouldn't be so hard. Playing the game I realised how different the perception of time was then compared to now. It was obscene how much time I had back then, and completely devoid of responsibilities, too.

Well, because of the time constraints I quickly hacked the game, added infinite money and proceeded to finish the game using a map and a walkthrough. I also was unable to finish the game due to two bugs: one where the Spathi should have given me an Umgah Caster and did not, and another where the Mycon were supposed to go to Organon and did not. Even so, it took me two full days, about 16 hours of gameplay. Anyway, I was close to the finish and I did watch the ending on YouTube (how nouveau of me! :-( ) For the people that loved playing this game in the past, maybe you should try it again. Old memories often bring complexity to present perspective. And for those who did not know of this game until this post, maybe you should try it, see what people of old considered a good game, even if they played it on 33Mhz 386 PCs with 4MB of RAM and 120MB hard drives.

Also, there is another attempt for a port to Windows from the same source called Project 6014, for some reason. I think it stalled, but maybe it brings some surprises to the table.

I leave you with a YouTube video gameplay by some guy (frankly the first I did find) if you are unwilling to take the trek yourself.

[youtube:KOndm_1w1ws]

I am a complete fan of the Ghost in the Shell franchise. For those unfortunate enough to not know what that is, it is a series of manga and anime stories that describe a near future where integration with machines is the order of the day, giving rise to cyborg bodies, mind hackers and all that stuff. It is also a police procedural, where the heroes are an independent force designed to counter cyber threats. It is also an espionage thriller, since many of the actions in the stories are not linear, but have many political implications and intricate plots. But what I thought was better than a beautiful and detailed sci-fi world with deep characterization and complex storylines is the exploration of the human soul and mind in a background that is mechanistic and science squeaky clean. To manage to do this repeatedly in manga, films and anime series is truly wonderful.

For me it all started with the movie. With impressive music by Kenji Kawai and a complexity and beauty and care for detail that I had never seen before (and rarely since), Ghost in the Shell blew my mind. Then there was the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a two season series that went a little more toward the police procedural, but overall was just as wonderful as the film. And then the second film: Innocence. And now they made Ghost in the Shell: Arise, a four part OVA series, prequel to the film. Having seen the first one hour part, I can say I am very pleased and can't wait to see the entire series. It details the roots of major Kusanagi and what are the roots of her team. Very nice indeed. The only thing that I miss is Kenji Kawai's music.

I leave you with the trailer for the series and my recommendation to see all of the Ghost in the Shell animes, even the Tachicoma OVAs :)



Update September 2014: I've watched the entire series. The episodes are almost stand alone and totally worth watching. I liked the fourth one most, as it was clearly created to made the connection with the film and series. I loved the small tips of the hat to hallmark scenes in the film: the cloaked jump from a skyscraper, the destruction of the cyber hands while pulling on the lid of a battle tank and so on. Does that mean that a new series and/or film will be created? I certainly hope so. My only problem with the new OVA is that the music of Cornelius is not even close to the haunting quality of Kenji Kawai's.

I've had the opportunity to play these games on the work XBox and I just had to make the blog entry to compare them. The thing is that, even if some corporation wants DC Comics and Mortal Kombat to merge somehow, they are completely different both in concept and audience.

I've been a player of Mortal Kombat since it first appeared on PCs. Me and school friends were spending hours playing it (rather than go learn something useful, obviously). Even then - or maybe it is better said that especially then - it was clear that the game had soul, that someone really spent their time and love to make it. No matter who bought it and what they did to it, Mortal Kombat never completely lost that soul. You see, the game idea is clear: two players face each other in combat, they use different characters who have different abilities and in the end someone wins. Unlike other games that start off neutered by the present socio-political situation in the States, MK started off as brutal and bloody. You could use all kinds of magic and utensils to hit your opponent, chained combos and see lots of blood, but the hallmark of the game was that, in the end, after you have defeated your opponent, you had the opportunity to perform a Fatality, something that was truly gruesome like ripping their heads out with a bit of the spine, or cutting them in two or setting them on fire.

Now you will probably ask why has my sick brain made the connection between a brutal combat game and true love and having a soul. The thing is that the first MK started out with 8 characters, plus some bosses and hidden characters, then MKII has twice as that, and the various incarnations of the game saw up to 65 characters. And yet you will be hard pressed to find any major version where a player could not win with any of the characters against any other if they were good enough. That sense of balance shows the dedication of the developer teams that endured the various corporate transformations of Mortal Kombat.

The ninth version, Mortal Kombat IX, has a lot of characters, over 30, although some are DLC and make little sense in the Mortal Kombat universe, like Freddy Krueger or Kratos. Of course, you had to pay for them. Later on the Komplete Edition of the game had all the characters and all their skins available. Except for a little overpowering of Noob Saibot, MK IX was pretty balanced. The graphics were awesome, truly, and had various fatalities and X-moves - the super move one could execute with three bars of power, which showed anatomical X-ray like details in slow motion like cracked skulls and ribs. The only problem was the controller. I am a PC user and it took a long time to get used with the XBox controller and even more to understand how pressing forward would sometimes make my character jump up and backwards or some other thing like that. I know the controllers at work were pretty messed up, but I swear there had to be something to do with the programming as well. Also, as far as I could see, the game dropped frames. If you moved fast enough, the other player would have difficulty making their special moves, probably because some part of the data or processing was lost. But overall the game was great, the story was nice and the combination of different characters, skins and violence was delicious.

To make the transition easier, I will also mention another game, also featuring Mortal Kombat characters: Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. It is an older game, launched in 2009. This weird crossover featured fights between the likes of Raiden and Shang Tsung versus Superman and the Joker. It is the last game made by Midway Games, the creators of Mortal Kombat and the first introduction of the "evil empire": Warner Brothers, who brought with them DC Comics. After that Midway went bankrupt and sold the rights to Mortal Kombat to WB. Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe had a bit of faux 3D movement, stage transitions (like punching someone through a wall and getting to another stage) and no fatalities. In fact, it had almost no blood, while the "powers" of the MK characters seemed oddly and randomly assigned (Shang Tsung had a punch teleport, Jax had a machine gun, etc). The playability of the game was OKish, with the major problem of in flight hits. One would jump toward an opponent, punch or kick and the character would stop in mid-air and perform the punch or kick there, which made it very unrealistic and static. Also, and that probably made it unpopular in the game room, it was unbalanced. Sonya Blade could kick everybody's ass just by jumping and kicking.

Enter Injustice: Gods Among Us, a game that is also made by NetherRealm Studios, who made Mortal Kombat IX, and also copyrighted by Warner Brothers. NetherRealm is actually what remains of Midway Games plus what remains of WB Games Chicago. In Injustice there are only DC Comics characters, the graphics are really good, a lot of stage interaction, flashy "social" statistics and "ranking", downloadable characters, obviously, and so on. The game play, though, total crap. Now, I may be very biased when it comes to Mortal Kombat type games, given by all love for the original game and concept, and I also understand that this wasn't supposed to be Mortal Kombat in the first place, but in my mind it represents everything that MK developers and players fought against. First, it has violence, but no blood. You get a lot of punches, kicks, explosions, object traumas like things falling on you, being thrown on you or through you (like arrows), only no blood. There are no parts of the body that get broken or smashed. It's like a good old fashioned cowboy brawl that results in someone saying "awwh, shucks!". Then there is the completely weird system of hits and blocks. You have to press Back to defend up and Down or Back-Down to defend down. Combine that with the fact that jumps are mainly vertical and so do not bring you closer to your opponent than walking, and you get a very asymmetrical game play where range fighters have to just run and shoot, while power characters have to dash a lot through bullets to get to their target. Even so, among similar type of characters there are huge differences. I would say that Deathstroke followed by Aquaman are by far the strongest characters, like lame-ass Green Arrow is a weakling. My favourite, Doomsday, had a lot of problems getting to anyone, even if it was supposed to be indestructible and on par with Superman. Well, they were on par in the game, Superman sucked, too. So: no blood, game imbalance and poor playability when there was obviously a lot of effort put into the shiny aspects of the game.

So you see, I had to write this post. Not because I didn't enjoy playing Injustice or because I think it is a bad game, but because it is like taking a cool 80's horror movie and turning into a 2010 remake that scares no one and can be played in cinemas to children. All Flash and no Meat, so to speak. MK is for gamers while DC games are for kids. All we need now is some Mortal Kombat game with parental controls on it. That being said, I can hardly wait Mortal Kombat 10! I hope they don't mess it up completely. As homework, you should try to read on the history of Mortal Kombat and of Midway Games. It's an interesting read. There was a really nice video with the developers of the first Mortal Kombat telling the story of the inception of the game, but I couldn't find it. Instead I leave you with the komplete :) history of the game from MKSecrets:

I remember fondly the first albums from Garbage. Shirley's naughty lips and delicious Scottish accent, the new sound that used all those electronic sound filters, the weird melodic combinations and heavy guitars. It all fit into my rebellious streak from back then. So I thought I would listen to their last album: Not Your Kind of People. Unfortunately, the title is quite correct: they are not my kind of people anymore. The entire album sounds like a single long song, a boring one. Gone is the Scottish accent, gone are the hard riffs and hard lyrics and most of all gone is the angry emotion from Shirley's voice. The background music is some kind of sound filtered electropop that doesn't do anything for me.

I don't really blame them. It is difficult to maintain the angry forceful image when you're 46 years old, but also experience should bring new value into music. It's not all youthful anger. Too bad, I really wanted to like this album. I leave you with the original song that brought them to fame: I'm Only Happy When It Rains.

It has been a while since I've posted music here. The performer is Lindsey Stirling and today is the first time I've heard of her, but I like her stuff. She is a pop violinist akin to Emilie Autumn, but not as dark. Here is the clip for Phantom of the Opera, 7 minutes long and very nice.

I thought about translating the lyrics to English, but there would be no point. It is pure poetry and it is beyond me. For the non-Romanian visitors, I just hope you like the song.

After such a long pause it seems only natural that I come up with a good chess blog post and I think this one, about the Evans Gambit, fits the bill. Since it is a gambit employed in the Giuoco Piano/Italian Game opening, it has been widely used from the 1820s when it was first documented. There are numerous videos on it on YouTube, but the one I consider the best is the one below, from GM Gregory Kaidanov.



I have also explored the gambit with ChessBase, but there it is difficult to see the spectacular games, the ones that lead in traps or quick wins, as they are often studied and the mistakes there not repeated in high level games.

1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 Nc6
3. Bc4 {The Ruy-Lopez (Bb6) is twice as common, but this is the second most popular move for White.} Bc5 {The main Black response to Bc4, almost on par with Nf6.}
4. b4 {The Evans Gambit, giving material for speed. It is interesting to note that this gambit is the second most popular way to go from here, after the mainline c3.}
(4. O-O {When first invented by Evans, he castled first.} d6 {Here is a trap in the original Evans Gambit.}
5. b4 Bxb4
6. c3 Ba5
7. d4 Bg4
8. Qb3 Qd7
9. Ng5 Nd8
10. dxe5 dxe5
11. Ba3 Nh6
12. f3 Bb6+
13. Kh1 Bh5
14. Rd1 Qc8
15. Rxd8+ Qxd8
16. Nxf7 Bxf7
(16... Nxf7
17. Bb5+ c6
18. Qe6+ Qe7
19. Qxe7#)
(16... Qh4
17. Bb5+ c6
18. Qe6+ Qe7
19. Qxe7#)
17. Bxf7+ Nxf7
18. Qe6+ Qe7
19. Qxe7#)
4... Bxb4 {The overwhelmingly more used move to accept the gambit, rather than decline it.}
(4... Bb6 {A possible run for the lot less employed gambit declined variation.}
5. a4 a6 6. Nc3
(6. a5 Ba7
7. b5 axb5
8. Bxb5 {This transposes into a sort of Ruy-Lopez.})
6... Nf6
7. Nd5 Nxd5
8. exd5 Nd4
9. a5 Ba7
10. d6 cxd6
11. c3 Nc6
12. O-O O-O
13. d4 h6
14. Re1 Qf6
15. Nd2 exd4
16. Ne4 Qg6
17. cxd4 d5
18. Bxd5 Nxb4
19. Bb3 d5
20. Ng3 Bg4
21. Qd2 Nc6
22. Bc2 Qf6
23. Qd3 g6
24. Bxh6 Bxd4
25. Bxf8 Rxf8 {0-1 Santos,M (2245)-Martins,C (2278)/Americana 2000/EXT 2001})
5. c3 {Multipurpose move to defend d4, make way for the queen to go to b3 and doing it with tempo as it is attacking the Black bishop.} Ba5 {Bishop retreats, keeping an eye on the White king.}
(5... Bc5 {Bc5 transposes easily, but also has the disadvantage of giving White an extra tempo after d4.}
6. d4 exd4
7. O-O)
(5... Be7
6. d4 Na5
7. Nxe5 Nxc4
8. Nxc4 {Beautiful center and development options.} d5
9. exd5 Qxd5
10. Ne3 Qd8
(10... Qa5
11. O-O Nf6
12. c4 O-O
13. Bb2)
11. O-O Nf6
12. c4 O-O
13. Nc3)
(5... Bd6 {Not used a lot, as it cramps the d pawn.}
6. d4 Nf6
7. O-O O-O
8. Re1 h6
9. Nbd2 {Leads for a closed game for both sides, not really in the Evans spirit.})
6. d4 {Defended by queen, knight and a pawn that is, at the moment, pinned, White aggressively makes a claim on the center.} exd4 {The defending pawn can not move and taking with the knight invites a host of unpleasantness}
(6... d6
7. Qb3 Qd7
8. dxe5 Bb6
9. Nbd2 Na5
10. Qc2 Nxc4
11. Nxc4 d5
12. exd5 Qxd5
13. Qa4+ Bd7
14. Nxb6 cxb6
15. Qb4 Ne7 {Three games in the database for this, two White wins and a draw.})
(6... Qe7
7. O-O Bb6
8. Ba3 d6
9. Bb5 Bd7
10. Bxc6 Bxc6
11. Nxe5 Bb5
12. Re1 Qe6
13. Nf3 O-O-O
14. Bb2 a5
15. Nbd2 Qd7
16. c4 Ba4
17. Nb3 Ne7
18. Qd2 Nc6
19. Bc3 Rhe8
20. d5 Nb4
21. Bxb4 axb4
22. Qxb4 Bxb3
23. axb3 {1-0 Sveshnikov,E (2560)-Sofieva,A (2370)/ Cappelle la Grande 1995/EXT 1997})
(6... Qf6
7. O-O Nge7
8. Bg5 Qd6
9. d5 Nd8
10. Qa4 b6
(10... f6
11. Bc1 Bb6
12. Na3 c6
13. Rd1 {Tchigorin})
11. Na3 a6 {Two games between Chigorin and Steinitz in 1889 from here: one won by White, the other by Black.})
7. O-O {Main themes in the Evans: keep your king safe, develop as many pieces as possible and prevent the Black king from castling.} Nge7 {Nge7 is the move masters have found most effective against the Evans gambit, as well as d6, but at amateur or club level it is more likely you will see Black take the pawn on c3.}
(7... d6 {Meant to protect against the push of the White pawn to e5 and liberating the bishop.}
8. cxd4 Bb6
9. Nc3
(9. d5 Na5
10. Bb2 Ne7 {And again: Nge7.}
11. Bd3 O-O {At this point we can assume that the gambit has failed, as Black has achieved castling, but they are not out of the woods yet.})
9... Bg4 {Black is planning to castle queen side and their position is getting better.}
(9... Nge7 {At this point, Nge7 is a mistake.}
10. Ng5 O-O
11. Qh5)
(9... Nf6
10. e5 dxe5
11. Ba3 {Not taking the e pawn, but preventing Black from castling!} Bxd4 {let us see how it could go down from here.}
12. Qb3 Qd7
13. Rae1 Na5
14. Nxe5 Nxb3
15. Nxf7+ Qe6
16. Bxe6 Bxe6
17. Nxh8 {White wins a lot of material here.})
10. Bb5 Bxf3
11. gxf3 {Take with the pawn to continue to protect d4.} a6
12. Ba4 Ba5
13. Bxc6+ bxc6
14. Qa4 Bxc3
15. Qxc6+ Kf8
16. Qxc3 {Now material is even, but Black cannot castle and does not control the center.})
(7... dxc3 {Taking the pawn, accepting this second gambit, might seem a good idea, but it only allows White to develop a powerful attack.}
8. Qb3 {attacking e7, b7, c3 as well as getting close to the lightly defended Black bishop.} Qf6 {The only options for Black to defend the e7 pawn are Qf6 or Qe7.}
(8... Qe7
9. Nxc3 Bxc3
(9... Nf6 {The usual move in this situation is Bxc3. The Nf6 variation is what happened in the Fischer-Fine game from 1963, the one in the video above. The rest of the moves are from that game.}
10. Nd5 Nxd5
11. exd5 Ne5
12. Nxe5 Qxe5
13. Bb2 Qg5
14. h4 Qxh4
15. Bxg7 Rg8
16. Rfe1+ Kd8
17. Qg3 Qxg3
18. Bf6#)
10. Qxc3 f6 {At this point Black has not yet achieved safety, but it is pretty close. I continue with the main line, without annotations.}
11. Ba3 d6
12. Bd5 Bd7
(12... Qd7
13. Rac1 Nge7
14. Rfe1 Qd8
15. Nh4 Bg4
16. Qg3 Qd7
17. h3 Be6 {Rajaboz-Smeets 1995, ended in draw.})
13. Rfe1 O-O-O {Black castles (Steinitz Gray 1872), although White manages to win.})
9. e5 {The pawn cannot be taken due to the threat of Re1.} Qg6 {Only good square for the queen.}
(9... Nxe5
10. Re1 d6
11. Qb5+ {and if Black protects the knight with the pawn on d7, they open themselves to this fork.})
10. Nxc3 {Gaining back a pawn and bringing yet another piece into the game. White has brought almost all the pieces out, while Black is cramped.} Nge7 {And here it is again, Ne7. If playing correctly, it seems Black cannot move that knight anywhere else in any variation.}
11. Ne2 {Very sophisticated idea, as it attempts to lure Black into castling and losing their queen or some other piece in its attempted rescue.} O-O {Black falls into the trap. The next few moves demonstrate it.}
12. Nf4 Qe4 {The only acceptable move for the queen.}
(12... Qg4
13. h3 Qf5
14. Bd3 Nd4
15. Nxd4 Qxe5)
(12... Qh6
13. Ne6)
13. Bd3 Qb4 {Only safe square.}
14. Qd1 {The Black queen is still in trouble, as Rb1 follows.} Ng6 {This is the only move that is giving respite to the queen, but White still gains advantage.}
(14... d6
15. Rb1 Qc5
16. Rb5 Qc3
17. Bb2 {Queen is trapped.})
15. Rb1 Qe7
16. Nd5 Qe6
17. Rb5 {threatening to take on a5 and then fork queen and rook at c7.} Rb8
18. Ba3 d6
19. exd6 cxd6
20. Ng5 Qd7
21. Qh5 h6
22. Nf6+ gxf6
23. Qxh6 fxg5
24. Bb2 Nce5
25. Rxe5 dxe5
26. Bxe5 f6
27. Bc4+ Rf7
28. Qxg6+ Kf8
29. Bd6+ Ke8
30. Qg8+ Rf8
31. Qxf8#)

For more background you can scour the net for videos on the Evans Gambit, there are a lot. There are a multitude of traps in the Evans as well, for the unprepared. One video that I do recommend, though, is Ruy Lopez vs Italian Game where it is explained why the Giuoco Piano is less favoured than the Ruy Lopez, even if it seems to open up more avenues of attack, and also what are the goals of White in the opening, thus explaining a lot about the coices made during the Evans Gambit.

Enjoy!

Another song that I've been listening obsessively for the last day or two. I am fascinated by the mouth on that girl. So filthy the words, so beautiful a smile, so machinegun the speed. Not something that I would have associated with Manhattan , either. Here is the video, I will paste the lyrics below, because you may not understand them from the song alone :) You may also understand why at first I didn't believe it was on a TV music station, where I heard it the first time.



Hey, I can be the answer
I’m ready to dance when the vamp up
And when I hit that dip, get your camera
You could see I been that bitch since the Pamper
And that I am that young sis, the beacon
The bitch who wants to compete and
I could freak a 'fit, that pump with the peep and
You know what your bitch become when her weave in
I just wanna sip that punch with your peeps and
Sit in that lunch if you're treatin'
Kick it with ya bitch who come from Parisian
She know where I get mine from, and the season
Now she wanna lick my plum in the evening
And fit that ton-tongue d-deep in
I guess that cunt getting eaten (4x)

I was in the 212
On the uptown A, nigga you know what’s up or don’t you?
Word to who made ya
I’m a rude bitch, nigga, what are you made up of?
I’m-a eat ya food up, boo
I could bust your eight, I’m-a do one too, fuck ya gon' do?
I want you to make bucks, I’m a look-right nigga, bet ya do want to fuck…
Fuck him like ya do want to cum
You're gay to get discovered in my two-one-deuce
Cock-a-licking in the water by the blue bayou
Caught the warm goo in your doo-rag too, son?
Nigga you’re a Kool-Aid dude
Plus your bitch might lick it, wonder who let you come to one-two
With ya doo-doo crew son… fuck are you into, huh?
Niggas better oooh-run-run
You could get shot, homie, if ya do want to
Put ya guns up, tell your crew don’t front
I’m a hoodlum nigga, you know you were too once
Bitch I’m 'bout to blew up too
I’m the one today, I’m the new shit, boo, young Rapunzel
Who are you, bitch, new lunch?
I’m-a ruin you, cunt (4x)

Ayo (ayo), I heard you're riding with the same tall, tall tale
Telling them you made some (made some)
Saying you're grinding but you ain't going nowhere
Why you procrastinate girl? (-nate girl)
You got a lot, but you just waste all yourself
They'll forget your name soon (name soon)
And won't nobody be to blame but yourself, yeah

What you gon' do when I appear?
W-when-when I premiere?
Bitch, the end of your lives are near
This shit been mine, mine (x2)

Bitch, I’m in the 212
With the fifth cocked nigga, its the two-one-zoo
Fuck you gon' do, when your goon sprayed up?
Bet his bitch won't get him, betcha you won't do much
See, even if you do want to bust
Your bitch’ll get you cut and touch you crew up too, Pop
You're playing with your butter like your boo won’t chew cock
The gun, too -- where you do eat poon, hon?
I’m fucking with you, cutie-q
What’s your dick like homie, what are you into, what’s the run, dude?
Where do you wake up? Tell your bitch keep hating, I’m the new one too, huh?
See, I remember you when you were
The young new face, but you do like to slumber, don’t you?
Now your boo up too, hon
I'm-a ruin you, cunt

What you gon' do when I appear?
W-when-when I premiere?
Bitch, the end of your lives are near
This shit been mine, mine (x2)

I was not going to write a chess post so soon, as I haven't really been playing lately and it might give the impression that I am either a good player or that I lost interest in other areas, like software developing. (I assure you, I did not, as I still waste spend most of my time at work, coding).

However, this opening seems a natural continuation of my previous post on the Sicilian Wing Gambit. There the b pawn was moved to b4 to counteract Black's attempt to control the center with c5. In the Polish opening, White starts directly with b4, denying Black moves like c5 and even hindering the development of their queen side knight.

The Polish, Sokolsky or Orangutan opening has been successfully used by international master Alexey Sokolsky, hence the name. He was not Polish though :) and I don't even care why someone would name a chess opening from an ugly orange ape (the video below explains it, though).

I will attempt to use several resources in this post. First, a PGN of the opening as a statistic of chess games played starting with b4.

1. b4 e5
(1... d5 2. Bb2 Nf6 3. e3 Bf5 4. Nf3 e6 5. a3 {This line ignores the White pawn on b4 and develops normally.}
(5. b5 {Moving the b pawn forward hinders the development of the queen's knight. Black is forced to either challenge the pawn, easily defended by the a and c pawns, as well as the bishop and knight, or develop their knight to d7.})
)
(1... Nf6 2. Bb2 e6 3. b5 {With White's pawn on b5 and Black's on d7, the knight on b8 is effectively out of the game.} d5 4. e3 c5 {Taking en passant would be a mistake, as it would free White's knight.}
(4... Be7 5. Nf3 O-O 6. c4 c6 {White has a thematic move: c4, with Black forced to protect the d5 pawn and lose avenues for development.})
5. bxc6
(5. c4 {Now it would be Black's turn to blunder in taking the c pawn and helping the White bishop develop while losing a center pawn. Black is not looking good with most their pieces having reduced mobility.} Be7
(5... Nbd7)
(5... b6)
)
5... Nxc6 {At this point Black is looking good, controlling the center and having more minor pieces developed.})
2. Bb2 d6
(2... Bxb4 3. Bxe5 Nf6 4. Nf3 O-O 5. e3 {The other common continuation. Black takes the pawn on b4, but loses a center pawn. At the same time Black develops a piece while forcing White to move twice - and later three times, maybe - the strong fianchettoed bishop.})
(2... f6 {Protecting the e pawn and blocking the White bishop's attack diagonal might look good, but it is robbing the Black night of its natural development square and weakening g6.} 3. b5 d5 4. e3 Be6 {Here Black has control of the center with a strong pawn structure, but can they hold it? The knights can only be developed on awkward 7th rank squares, the bishops have to wait for them and the queen has nowhere to go. The computer gives a complete equality between sides, but is it?})
3. e3
(3. c4 Nf6 {Transposing to the English opening} 4. e3 Be7)
(3. b5 {The natural continuation of b4, blocking the Black knight.} Nf6 4. e3 Be7 {Again, an awkward position for Black: everybody has to wait for the knight on b8.})
(3. e4 Nf6 4. Nc3 Be7 5. Bc4 O-O {Two bishops aimes straight at Black's king.})
3... Nf6 4. c4
(4. Nf3 Be7 5. Be2 O-O 6. O-O {Another variation similar to many before.})
4... Be7 {Consider this the main line, yet with less than 100 games played in this move order.} *

What we can see is two major thematic moves for White: b4-b5, blocking the development of the Black knight. The other is c4, protecting b5 and challenging d5. If Black takes (d5xc4), it loses a center pawn and helps develop White's light bishop. Also, after b4 and the dark bishop fianchetto, a common White move is e3, helping in completely domineering the center dark squares.

As Black, one can observe a tendency to go for the light squares. If White's pawn reaches b5, the only real square where the Black queen knight can develop is d7. That means that the d pawn cannot depend on the protection of the queen all the time and the light bishop will have to develop first or remain blocked by the knight. In the last game in this post, for example, one can notice Black immediately sacrificing the light squared bishop for White's king knight, relieving some of the pressure on Black's king side and giving freedom for pawns to occupy e6 of even f5.

A second resource is some real life games:
Sokolsky - Byvshev - 1951
[Event "URS-ch sf"]
[Site "Lvov"]
[Date "1951.??.??"]
[Round "?"]
[White "Sokolsky, Alexey"]
[Black "Byvshev, Vasily Mikhailovich"]
[Result "1-0"]
[ECO "A00"]
[PlyCount "75"]
[EventDate "1951.??.??"]
[EventType "tourn"]
[EventRounds "19"]
[EventCountry "URS"]
[Source "ChessBase"]
[SourceDate "1998.11.10"]

1. b4 Nf6 2. Bb2 e6 3. b5 d5 4. e3 a6 5. a4 Nbd7 6. Nf3 Bd6 7. c4 c5 8. d3 O-O
9. Nbd2 b6 10. Be2 Bb7 11. O-O Qc7 12. h3 Rfe8 13. Rc1 axb5 14. axb5 Ra2 15.
Qb3 Rea8 16. Nb1 Qd8 17. Rfd1 R2a4 18. Nc3 R4a5 19. d4 Bb8 20. cxd5 exd5 21.
dxc5 bxc5 22. Nxd5 Nxd5 23. Rxd5 Bxd5 24. Qxd5 Qe7 25. Rd1 Nf8 26. Bc4 R8a7 27.
Ne5 Bxe5 28. Bxe5 Ra4 29. Bd6 Qe6 30. b6 Rd7 31. b7 Rb4 32. Qxc5 Rxd6 33. Rxd6
Rb1+ 34. Kh2 Qe7 35. Bd5 g6 36. f4 Kg7 37. Qd4+ Kh6 38. Rb6 1-0

A more recent game, Kutuzov (2277) - Burkmakin (2571) - 2004. Kutuzon wins with the Polish.
[Event "RUS-chT2"]
[Site "Sochi"]
[Date "2004.04.28"]
[Round "9.1"]
[White "Kutuzov, Denis"]
[Black "Burmakin, Vladimir"]
[Result "1-0"]
[ECO "A00"]
[WhiteElo "2277"]
[BlackElo "2571"]
[PlyCount "87"]
[EventDate "2004.04.20"]
[EventType "team"]
[EventRounds "9"]
[EventCountry "RUS"]
[Source "ChessBase"]
[SourceDate "2004.07.06"]
[WhiteTeam "13"]
[BlackTeam "02"]
[WhiteTeamCountry "RUS"]
[BlackTeamCountry "RUS"]

1. b4 e6 2. Bb2 Nf6 3. a3 d5 4. e3 Bd6 5. Nf3 Nbd7 6. c4 c6 7. Be2 e5 8. cxd5
cxd5 9. O-O O-O 10. Nc3 a6 11. Qb3 Nb6 12. Na4 Nc4 13. Bc3 b5 14. Nc5 e4 15.
Nd4 Qc7 16. h3 Re8 17. a4 Bxc5 18. bxc5 bxa4 19. Rxa4 Nd7 20. Bb4 Rb8 21. Qc3
Nde5 22. f4 exf3 23. Nxf3 Nxf3+ 24. Bxf3 Bb7 25. Qd4 Rbd8 26. Bc3 f6 27. Rb1
Ne5 28. Bh5 Nc6 29. Ba5 Qe7 30. Bxd8 Rxd8 31. Qb2 Bc8 32. Qb6 Ne5 33. c6 Nc4
34. Qd4 Qc7 35. Rc1 Rd6 36. Bf3 Kf8 37. Qc5 Nxd2 38. Bxd5 Qe7 39. Kh1 f5 40.
Rd4 Ne4 41. Bxe4 Rxd4 42. Qxd4 fxe4 43. Rf1+ Ke8 44. Rf4 1-0

We must have a loss. Meijers (2507) - Naiditsch (2641) - 2005.
[Event "BL2-Ost 0506"]
[Site "Germany"]
[Date "2005.10.23"]
[Round "1.1"]
[White "Meijers, Viesturs"]
[Black "Naiditsch, Arkadij"]
[Result "0-1"]
[ECO "A00"]
[WhiteElo "2507"]
[BlackElo "2641"]
[PlyCount "67"]
[EventDate "2005.10.23"]
[EventType "team-tourn"]
[EventRounds "9"]
[EventCountry "GER"]
[Source "ChessBase"]
[SourceDate "2006.11.23"]
[WhiteTeam "Nickelhuette"]
[BlackTeam "Bindlach"]
[WhiteTeamCountry "GER"]
[BlackTeamCountry "GER"]

1. b4 c6 2. e3 Nf6 3. Nf3 d5 4. Bb2 Bg4 5. h3 Bxf3 6. Qxf3 Nbd7 7. a4 e5 8. b5
Bd6 9. g4 O-O 10. Be2 Ne4 11. Qg2 Bb4 12. Bd3 Nd6 13. O-O e4 14. Be2 Qe7 15. f4
exf3 16. Bxf3 Nc4 17. Bd4 Nde5 18. d3 c5 19. Bxe5 Qxe5 20. dxc4 Qxa1 21. Bxd5
Qe5 22. e4 Rad8 23. g5 Ba5 24. h4 Kh8 25. Rf5 Qd4+ 26. Kh1 g6 27. Rf1 f5 28.
gxf6 Rxf6 29. c3 Bxc3 30. Nxc3 Qxc3 31. Bxb7 Rdf8 32. Rxf6 Rxf6 33. Kh2 Qd4 34.
Qg3 0-1

Note that even if I have a huge database at my disposal, most of them are not annotated at all (like these three). There is a lot of chess knowledge out there that just waits to be analysed, digitized and shared. Help me out if you can!


In this game Black quickly realizes the light bishop is going to be hindered by the queen side knight and trades it off immediately, then develops the knight to d7 while the d pawn is protected by a pawn chain.

And the final resource, a video explaining how one should play against the Polish, from Black's perspective.
[youtube:EQQugBzKefE]

As a conclusion, I liked this opening. It is uncommon for a reason, as it is rather slow and risky. White has the advantage of the first move, they should not waste it on side pawns. However it does seem more manageable than the Sicilian Wing Gambit and can easily transpose in the English opening, which I haven't played, but is in heavy use. What I did't like at either this or the wing gambit is a lack of traps. There probably are a few, but I would have to find them myself. I hope you liked it, too.

Please let me know which formula for a chess blog post you like more. I've tried several and I will continue to try in the future, but I would like some feedback from people who read about chess on my blog. Thanks!

Update October 2014:
Sergio Zaina, from Brazil, sent me this trap in the Polish:
1.b4 c6 2.Bb2 Qb6 3.a3 a5 4.c4 axb4 5.c5 Qxc5 6.axb4 1-0

A wing gambit is a way for one of the players in a game of chess to sacrifice a pawn on the b or g files in order to deflect defenders of the center. Like all gambits, it is an aggressive attempt to gain position by sacrificing material, in this case, an attempt to control the center of the board. Today I want to talk about a gambit that occurred to me while I was thinking of a way to play against the Sicilian Defence. It involves moving a pawn to b4 to counteract the Black move c5, which is also, in a way, a sort of wing attack. I liked the concept: you outflank the opponent. Looking in the chess database, this is called the Sicilian Wing Gambit.

The first thing to notice is that the b pawn is irremediably lost. Declining the gambit brings no advantages to Black whatsoever, so they must take. After c5xb4, you have lost a pawn and also blocked the c3 square, the traditional best starting point of the queen's knight. So, as white, you have moved two pawns, lost one and also the best square for one of the minor pieces, while developing none. It doesn't look good and, for that reason, this gambit has been scorned in the past as unprincipled. It has made a comeback, though. It is not something you should expect to see at world chess championships, but it is good for blitz games and for throwing your opponent off track.

Even if White appears to have lost time, material and positional advantage, there is no clear way for Black to punish them. We will examine some of the options that Black has and where they led in various database and computer simulated games. The next move of White's is a3, attacking the pawn and preparing to open the a file. Another option of White's is to immediately challenge the center with d4. We will examine both options, as well as some rare variations (of such a rare gambit), like Nf3. So here is the PGN file I've compiled. Move carefully through all variations and read the comments. It might intrigue you enough that you would adopt the Sicilian Wing Gambit as a permanent part of your chess repertoire:
1. e4 c5 2. b4 {challenges c5 in order to deflect it from d4} cxb4
(2... b6 3. bxc5
(3. Bc4 {White is not forced to take.} e6)
(3. Nf3 {A normal development plan can be attempted while deciding what to do on c5} Bb7)
(3. b5 {Or even push the pawn forward, blocking the b knight and the rook for a while} Bb7
(3... a6 {although I don't particularly like the possibilities after a6.})
4. Nc3 e6 5. Nf3 Nf6)
3... bxc5 {Here Black declined the gambit and maintained a pawn on c4.} 4. Nc3 Nc6 5. Rb1 {But White gets first to control the open b file.} g6 6. g3 Bg7 7. Bg2 Ba6 {Black has tried to revert to their original Sicilian plan, but some parts are clearly different because of the lack of the b pawns})
3. a3
(3. d4 {White might want to move for the center immediately} d5 4. e5 {But here the engines give almost one full pawn to black}
(4. exd5 Qxd5 {while here the Black queen is safe from harassment because the b4 pawn is still there.})
4... Nc6)
(3. Nf3 {This is the line suggested by a chess engine. I'll follow it through a little more.} Nf6 4. e5 Nd5 5. a3 d6 6. Bc4 dxe5 7. Nxe5 e6 8. axb4 Bxb4 9. Bb2 O-O 10. O-O Qg5 11. Re1 Nc6 12. Qf3 Bd6 {No humans have played a game like this. From here the engine mercilessly simplifies the situation.} 13. Nxc6 bxc6 14. g3 Qf5 15. Qxf5 exf5 16. Bxd5 cxd5 17. Ba3 Bxa3 18. Rxa3 {Black has managed to control the center, even if the White rooks are really active.} Be6 19. Ra5 d4 20. Na3 Rfc8 21. d3 {At this point I ended the simulation. Clearly White has failed to control the center and gained only limited mobility. Black has an extra doubled pawn and the game will probably draw.})
(3. c4 {Santasiere variation: an even more gambity move, baiting b4xc3 followed by Nc3 and gaining development and center control. The few games that played like this did not finish well for White, though.} bxc3 4. Nxc3 g6 5. Bc4 Nc6 6. Nf3 Bg7 7. O-O Nf6 8. e5 Ng4 9. d4 O-O 10. h3 Nh6 11. Bf4 d6 12. Qe2 Nf5 13. Rfd1 Qa5 14. Rac1 e6 {This is an entire game that ended in an agreed draw - Rainer-Guenter 1995})
3... bxa3
(3... d5 4. exd5 {this is the main move}
(4. f3 e5 {A single game with this situation. White has delayed too much piece development and pushing of the d pawn. Black won.})
(4. e5 {But this is met more and more in Blitz games.} Nc6 5. d4 Bf5
(5... Qb6 6. Be3 Bf5 7. Bd3 Bxd3 8. Qxd3 e6 {This is the recommendation in the video, with Black having a better game.} 9. Ne2 Nge7 10. O-O Nf5 11. axb4 Bxb4 12. c3 Be7 13. Nd2 O-O 14. Nf4 Rfd8 15. g4 Nxe3 16. Qxe3 {Black is better with the a and b passed pawns.})
6. axb4 Nxb4 7. Bb5+
(7. Na3 e6 8. c3 Nc6 {This is the situation covered in the video, Black has extra development, but difficulty in continuing it. White eyes b5 and has everything wide open.})
7... Bd7)
4... Qxd5
(4... Nf6 5. axb4 Nxd5 6. Nf3 Nxb4 7. d4 Bf5 8. Na3 e6)
5. Nf3 {Marshall variation}
(5. Bb2 {Marienbad variation} e5 6. axb4)
5... e5 6. axb4
(6. Bb2 Nc6 7. c4 {en passant would be a bad move, due to Nc3} Qe6 8. Bd3 Nf6 9. O-O Bd6 10. Re1 O-O 11. axb4 Nxb4 12. Bf1 e4 13. d3 Qd7 14. dxe4 Bc5 15. Bxf6 Qxd1 16. Rxd1 gxf6 {Another variation from the video, stopped here as it didn't look very promising for Black.})
6... Bxb4 {White's plan backfired. Instead of a strong center and fast development, Black has the center and a strong center queen. The engines, however, show a mere 0.2pawns in advantage for Black.})
(3... e6 4. axb4 Bxb4 5. c3 Be7 {Another win for Black: a silly dark bishop, a blocked knight, but White keeps control over part of the center and controls one open semifile.})
(3... Qa5 {A possible annoying move} 4. Bb2 {But this solves most of the issues.} Nc6 5. Nf3 Nf6 6. Bd3 {Yet not all. The d pawn is effectively pinned.})
(3... Nf6 4. e5 Nd5 5. axb4 Nxb4 6. c3 N4c6 7. d4 {Black has a knight out, but White has a monster pawn chain, an open semi file and a lot of open avenues. Black will attempt to control the light squares, while White will be busy trying to achieve some sort of king safety.})
4. Nxa3 {A knight on the rim is dim, but here it prepares to go to b5, where it would force the queen to defend c7 and threaten a7} d6 5. d4 {Black wanted to stop White from having a two pawn center. Instead, even a three pawn center is possible.} Nf6 6. Bd3 {this seems to be the mainline, but even so, there are only 43 games starting like this in my game database} Nc6 {From here, engines and database, all three games, show equality between players.} *


Take notice that I am still a beginner in chess and my analysis is based on what I've compiled from the database of chess games and a video. Here is a video and the PGN of a game that played along the main line in my analysis (Vladimir Grabinsky 2361 - Albert Lyubimtsev 2148, from 2003) where White won.

[youtube:yN73tcJlsKw]

1. e4 c5 2. b4 cxb4 3. a3 bxa3 4. Nxa3 d6 5. d4 Nf6 6. Bd3 Nc6 7. c3 g6 8. Ne2 Bg7 9. O-O O-O 10. f4 Ne8 11. Kh1 Nc7 12. Qe1 a6 13. f5 b5 14. Nc2 Bd7 15. Qh4 Ne8 16. Rf3 e6 17. Qg3 {White missed an opportunity here, according to the chess engine.}
(17. Bg5 f6 18. Rh3 fxg5 19. Qxh7+ Kf7 20. Qxg6+ Ke7 21. Qxg5+ Rf6 22. Nf4 exf5 23. Re1 Kf8 24. exf5 Rh6 25. Rxe8+ Bxe8
(25. .. Qxe8 {This would have been a blunder leading to massive material loss and/or mate in about 15 moves.})
26. Qxh6 Bxh6 27. Ne6+ Ke7 28. Nxd8 Nxd8 29. Rxh6 {A much simplified position, where White has two extra pawns and Black has an exposed king.})
17. .. e5 18. Be3 Bf6 19. Raf1 Ng7 20. Bh6 {This move maintains both sides to a near equality, with a slight advantage for White.}
(20. d5 {The computer sees this option, which wins almost a pawn immediately and locks the king side from the defence of Black's pieces} Bh4 21. Qh3 Nb8 22. g4 Ne8 23. Bh6 g5 24. f6 b4 25. Ne3 a5 26. cxb4 Qc8 27. bxa5 Na6 28. Ng3 Qc5 29. Ngf5 Ra7 30. Ne7+ Kh8 31. Bxf8 h5 32. Bh6 Qxe3 33. Rxe3 Bxg4 34. Qg2 Kh7 35. Bxg5 Rxe7
(35. .. Bxg5 36. Rh3 Nxf6
(36. .. Bxh3 37. Qxg5 Bg2+ 38. Qxg2 Nxf6 39. Rxf6 Rxe7 40. Qg5 Re6 41. dxe6 fxe6 42. Rh6#)
37. Rxf6 Kg7
(37. .. Bxf6 38. Qxg4 h4 39. Qg8+ Kh6 40. Nf5+ Kh5 41. Be2#)
(37. .. Rxe7 38. Qxg4 Kg8 39. Qxg5+ Kf8 40. Rxh5 Ke8 41. Rxd6 f6 42. Qg8#) 38. Rxh5 Rc7 39. Qxg4 Rc1+ 40. Rf1 Rxf1+ 41. Bxf1 f5 42. Qxf5 Bxe7 43. Rh7+ Kg8 44. Qf7#)
36. Bxh4 Nac7 37. fxe7 f6 38. Be2 f5 39. Bxg4 hxg4 40. Rxf5 Ng7 41. Qxg4 Nce6 42. Rh5+ Nxh5 43. Qxh5+ Kg8 44. dxe6 d5 45. Rg3#)
20. .. Qe7 {-2.11/15 10 The engine recommends Ne3, which leads to a variation where for more than 20 moves white appears to be a minor piece ahead, only the score is positional only. Queens come off the board, too.} 21. Qf2 {+0.26/14 10 Alekhin's Gun always looks impressive. From here it goes downhill for Black.} gxf5 22. Rg3 f4 23. Nxf4 exf4 24. Qxf4 Nd8 25. e5 *

Update: I've updated the above game with some computer analysis.

It is important to understand that Black did not lose because of the wing gambit, but because of their own mistakes further on. According to the computer, both players had almost complete equality up to almost the 20th move, which does not bode well for White. Most chess engines give about 0.25 points to White for having the first move, so somewhere that advantage was lost. However, we are not computers.

For what I see in the various games that were played using this anti Sicilian opening, I see several key points where each side is trying to reach. A common theme is the pushing of the e pawn from e4 to e5, defending it with d4 and defending that (while cutting access to the White king) with c3. Other variations see a strong three pawn center for White, making a sham of Black's attempted Sicilian. Moving the e pawn prematurely, before getting rid of the Black b4 pawn seems to be a mistake, though, even if it immediately achieves the classic two pawn center. The a3 move seems to want to open up the a file for the rook, but in the simulations I've run, the rook doesn't seem to have an important role. Also to note is that the queen side knight will most likely take the Black pawn on a3, which takes it to the rim of the board and away from the center. So even if control of the center is achieved, maintaining it might become problematic. Gutsy c4 pawn push, goading Black to take it en passant, only works if Black falls for it and even so, not very well: the knight on c3 will remain undefended on a move like d4. The computers recommend Black ignoring that pawn and pushing to e5 with more than half a point advantage.

On Black's side, it appears as there are several strategies as well. Defending with b6 declines the gambit and leads to something similar to the original Sicilian, regardless of the desired flavour of it. Even if White is pushing the pawn to b5 and hinders the development of the Black queen side knight. While the Black pawn is still on b4, attempts to break out the center, like the Scandinavian looking d5 work better, as an exchange on that square can end with a comfortable Black queen on d5 without the threat of Nc3. In general, taking the pawn on a3 seems to be a mistake, as White will only aid in the dark bishop's development if they take and the Black pawn on b4 can be defended in multiple ways further on, invalidating the gambit. A possible annoying move for White is moving the Queen to a5 and the recommendation of the guy in the video is to move it on b6, an intriguing strategy that seems to break the opening principle of not bringing the queen out too soon. Moving the e pawn at least to e6 seems to bring benefits as well.

Even if the Sicilian Wing Gambit is not very common and thus not analysed in depth so much, it doesn't mean it can't be a useful tool. I know that most chess opening videos have more to offer than what I posted above, but given the rarity of the gambit, it only makes sense to have less information on it, no tested traps, etc. If you play this opening, please let me know. I could update this post with your real life experience playing it.

Update: I've found a page where GM Roman Dzindzichashvili considers the Wing Gambit in the Sicilian a reason to seek psychiatric help :) Here is the link.
Also, I have updated the PGN with the official names for some of the variations of the gambit.

Update 8 March 2016: I've revisited this gambit with more research and computer analysis, check it out: Sicilian Wing Gambit - Revisited

I've stumbled upon the Latvian Gambit and wanted to test it immediately against my colleagues. As you will see in the video, it seems a wonderfully aggressive opening, something akin to Shock and Awe, riddled with traps against your opponent. The truth is that it is an unprincipled opening, abandoning material advantage in the hope that your adversary will slip up and expecting you to have the skills to attack and defend accurately as the game progresses. I did manage to capture the queen once, but only after pointing out to my opponent that he could have forked my king and rook, so that the trap would work - he hadn't noticed. In the rest of the games, none of them running the course of the video you will see, the lack of skill on both sides of the table forced me to abandon this gambit for now, instead looking for something more principled and more appropriate for my playing level.

So here is the game from TheChessWebsite:

[youtube:2flPdsk9uz4]

I've experimented with chess engines and watched other videos about the gambit and constructed a rather complex PGN file. You can play with it here. Don't forget to click on the variations to see how the game could progress. There is even a full game there, from a video that has the link in the comment.
[Event "The Latvian Gambit"]
[Site "Siderite's Blog"]
[Date "2012.04.18"]
[Round "?"]
[White "Siderite"]
[Black "Siderite"]
[Result "0-1"]
[BlackElo "2400"]
[ECO "C63"]
[Opening "Spanish"]
[Time "13:45:38"]
[Variation "Schliemann, 4.Nc3 fxe4 5.Nxe4 Nf6"]
[WhiteElo "2400"]
[TimeControl "0+60"]
[Termination "normal"]
[PlyCount "11"]
[WhiteType "human"]
[BlackType "human"]

1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 f5 3. Nxe5 (3. Bc4 3. .. fxe4 4. Nxe5 Nf6 (4. .. Qg5 5. d4
Qxg2 6. Qh5+ g6 7. Bf7+ Kd8 8. Bxg6 Qxh1+ 9. Ke2 c6) (4. .. d5 5. Qh5+ g6
6. Nxg6 hxg6 7. Qxg6+ (7. Qxh8 Kf7 8. Qd4 Be6 9. Bb3 Nc6 10. Qe3 Bh6 11. f4
Nge7) 7. .. Kd7 8. Bxd5 Nf6 9. Nc3 Qe7) 5. Nf7 Qe7 6. Nxh8 d5 7. Be2 (7.
Bb3 Bg4 {White loses the queen, one way or another} 8. f3 exf3+ 9. Kf2 Ne4+
10. Kf1 (10. Kg1 f2+ 11. Kf1 Bxd1) 10. .. fxg2+ 11. Kxg2 Bxd1)) (3. Nc3 3.
.. Nf6 {Continue as for the king gambit (reversed)}) (3. exf5 3. .. e4 4.
Ne5 Nf6 5. Be2 d6 6. Bh5+ Ke7 7. Nf7 Qe8 8. Nxh8 Qxh5 9. Qxh5 Nxh5) (3. d4
fxe4 4. Nxe5 Nf6 5. Bg5 d6 6. Nc3 dxe5 7. dxe5 Qxd1+ 8. Rxd1 h6 9. Bxf6
gxf6) 3. .. Qf6 (3. .. Nc6 4. Qh5+
{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZHGgEGM6SQ} (4. Nxc6 bxc6 5. exf5 Nf6 6.
d4 d5 7. Bd3 Bd6 8. Be3 O-O 9. Nd2 Rb8 10. Rb1 Qe7 11. O-O h5 12. Nf3 Ne4
13. Bxe4 dxe4 14. Ng5 Bxf5 15. Qxh5 Rf6 16. Nh3 Qd7 17. Bg5 g6 18. Qh4 Rf7
19. Nf4 Rh7 20. Qg3 Kg7 21. Qc3 Rbh8 22. d5+ Kg8 23. h3 {correct move dxc6}
Bxh3 24. Qxc6 (24. Nxh3 Rxh3 25. gxh3 Rxh3) 24. .. Bf5 25. Nh3 Bxh3 26. Bf6
Bxg2 {Bh2+ would have been mate in 4} (26. .. Bh2+ 27. Kxh2 Bxg2+ 28. Kg3
Rh3+ 29. Kxg2 Qg4#) 27. f4 Qxc6 28. dxc6 Bf3 29. b4 Bxf4 30. Rbe1 Rh1+ 31.
Kf2 R8h2#) 4. .. g6 5. Nxg6 (5. Nxc6 dxc6) 5. .. Nf6 6. Qh4 Rg8 7. Nxf8 Rg4
8. Qh6 Rxe4+ 9. Kd1 (9. Be2 Nd4 10. Nc3 Nxe2 11. Nxe2 Qe7) 9. .. Ng4) (3.
.. Bc5 4. exf5 Bxf2+ 5. Kxf2 Qh4+ 6. Kf3 (6. Kg1 6. .. Qd4#) (6. Ke2 6. ..
Qe4+) (6. g3 Qd4+ 7. Kg2 Qxe5 8. Nc3 Qxf5 9. Bd3 Qf7 10. b3 Nf6 11. Re1+
Kd8 12. Qf3 Nc6 13. Ne4 Qe7 14. Nxf6 Qxf6 15. Qxf6+ gxf6 16. Bb2) 6. .. Nf6
(6. .. Ne7 7. Nc3 d6 8. g3 Qh5+ 9. g4 Qh4 10. Qe1 Qxe1 11. Bb5+ Nbc6 (11.
.. c6 12. Rxe1 cxb5 13. Nd3 Nc6 14. Nxb5) 12. Rxe1 dxe5 13. Rxe5 O-O 14.
Re4 h5 15. h3 Nxf5 16. Bc4+ Kh7 17. gxf5 Bxf5 18. Kg2 Bxe4+ 19. Nxe4 Rae8)
(6. .. b5)) (3. .. fxe4 4. Qh5+ g6 5. Nxg6 Nf6 6. Qe5+) (3. .. d6 4. Qh5+
g6 5. Nxg6 Nf6 6. Qh4) 4. Nc4 (4. d4 d6 5. Nc4 fxe4 6. Nc3 Qg6 7. f3 exf3
8. Qxf3 Nc6 9. Bd3 Qg4) 4. .. fxe4 5. Nc3 Qf7 (5. .. Qg6 6. d3 exd3 7. Bxd3
Qxg2 8. Be4 Qh3 {At this point black has not developed and is lost}) 6. d4
(6. Nxe4 d5) 0-1



Update: Here is another analysis of the Latvian Gambit, by Abby Marshall.
Roman Dzindzichashvili considers the Latvian gambit a sign of mental illness.
Chessexplained also has a video about it.