Here's a quick bit about the Year of the Rat Decathlon part whatever the hell it is now:

MD vs CS

1.g3 Nf6 2.d3 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 (How *dare* somebody fianchetto a bishop before me!) 4.Bd2 d5 5.Qc1 d4 6.Nd1

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At this point our board one told me that 'I should just @#$%ing give up.' I did no such thing.

The game, to be fair, looks like it was played between two small boys. White breaks down the Petrov Fortress, wins two pawns, get a rook on the 7th ... and *loses* the ending.

Not with a big blunder, either, but move by horrible move, in the manner of one who's never been past move 25 before.

And I'm one of the two team members who allegedly speaks English. The others are a ragtag lot.

Fast Eddie Gufeld used to get annoyed as well when beaten to the fianchetto.

For almost the whole game Fritz evaluated black as clearly better: the beast can see through chimeras as well.

So Suttles, in some odd way, is a very 'sound' player. Maybe not exactly classical, but he wasn't making 'bad' moves either.

I read something recently about an Italian research team who compared various grandmasters to engines -- not so much an absolute measure of anything as a measure of their engine-like-ness. Predictably, Karpov came out on top: though I don't think Suttles would have been as far behind as some might think.

First, some background: I use Fritz 10 with its opening book turned on (mostly) -- so it isn't thinking for the first few moves, just following its book. However, 'book' lines also tend to include bits of Suttlesiana, so you can't take anything for granted.

What sometimes happens is the engine struggles to come to grips with the position for two or three moves after leaving the book, whether that happens on move 4 or move 18. The humanoid plan pushes one way, silicon logic the other: and sometimes they fall out violently.

But to consider the matter at hand: 1.e4 g6 2.d4 Bg7 3.Nc3 d6 4.f4 Nc6 5.Be3 was all in Fritzy's book. But at this point it's on its own.

First choice: 5...Nf6 (dirty rat?)
2nd choice [by a small margin]: 5...Nh6 [as played by Dunc]. The 3rd choice was some way behind.

This gave me a mild jolt, but was nothing to what came next. After 6.Be2, Fritz's first choice was the same as Suttles' -- 6...d5

Not just that, but by a huge margin (for a non-forcing opening line), 6...d5 was '=' with a nominal +0.23 for white. The next move was far worse, over +0.5 in white's favour.

This at 14-ply or so. I let it run awhile, and the margin increased. By 18-ply, 6...d5 was still far ahead, while the next move (6...0-0) had fallen to +0.75 or so.

The point seems to be that only ...d5 stops white from playing d5 himself. The line after 6...0-0 7.d5 is not pretty for black.

So there we have it: Suttles the super-meta-classicist, anticipator of engines ... the man who was Thursday Fortnight ...

The man who was right, apparently. In centuries to come they'll smile indulgently at the innocence of Fischer's naive opening play, pointing to Suttles as the only human back then who *understood*.

But Nh1 is almost normal these days. I played ...Nh1 as *black* recently -- deep into the other guy's turf. I had a rescue plan mapped out, which involved a shock entry to f2, where it could be taken: but if snapped off, my *other* knight had a series of deadly forks.

What I'd missed, alas, was that after those deadly forks the 2nd knight ended up in the other corner, at a1, with no exit, and the enemy king strolls over and chops it off.

"I'll be the grandmaster, and you can be 125 scruffy punters, okay?"

"No, I wanna be the GM! You *promised*"

"OK, but we've only got one set. We'll have to do it blindfold ..."

[all, singing]

(1) 6... d5 [+0.32]
(2) 6... e5 [+0.63]
(3) 6... e6 [+0.71]

Katalymov is another guy I've kept an eye on. Have we talked about him before? He has an eponymous variation of the French, which I've tried a few times -- 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nd2/c3 dxe4 4.Nxe4 Qd5!? -- which he sprang on some of the heavies like Botvinnik and Bronstein in the mid-60s. Then he vanished. Siberia, possibly. Few games in the 70s, none between 1980 and 1995.

Then, at the turn of the century, he showed up again, played his variation a few times in Tomsk. And stopped again circa 2002. Possibly dead for good this time, but you never can tell.

His 1959 game with Vistinietzki went:
1.d4 g6
2.e4 d6
3.Nc3 Bg7
4.f4 Nc6
5.Be3 Nh6
6.Be2 d5
7.e5 Nf5
8.Bf2 h5

... and Black won (0-1, 33).

Here's a position from that Vistinietzki-Katalymov game. You'll notice that Black's development is far from complete, but White has also got in on the act with moves like Nd1. What happens next?

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White has just played 12.b3

Katalymov replied 12 ... Bf8!

Not many comments where I looked, btw, unless you mean Pedr and his downloads?

The French line with ...Qd5 was something I used in blitz games -- black can rattle off a lot of moves while white stops to think, and you get a decent attack if it goes well. At slower rates, though, it tends to get crushed.

I also - this is the 70s/80s - experimented with just about every ...b6 line, including the Katalymov Sicilian (also pretty dubious, I think -- Basman was also a devotee). My favorite was the French variation 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nd2 b6 ... but I had the 'bad' luck to have good results at first and then go on using it past its sell-by date.

Lately, though, I've tried a few ...b6 lines again -- against the English, for example, with a Queen's Indian transposition sometimes. I have a slight impression that ...b6 generally is coming back into fashion -- but I doubt if we'll ever see the kind of prominence it had when Korchnoi was using it to win candidates matches against Polugayevsky and Spassky.