13 June, 2010

TL4545: Another round, another Bird....

Note to self....if you intend to play Bird's Opening, then you had better learn more about From's Gambit and how to defeat it !

In this Team League game, as an antidote to avoiding the Scandinavian that my opponent plays with regularity, ( and to cover a lack of preparation )  I opted for 1.f4, and just as in my previous outing I meet 1...e5 : From's Gambit.

Some statistics:

In my Master-games database f4 scores 47% for white, not exactly great.

However, in Team League (TL), it scores 56% which is actually pretty good ! A total of 333 TL games started with f4 and only 36 went down the path of Black's reply of e5 and From's Gambit, so for me to end up with two in a row is quite unfortunate !

Onto the game...