Speelman's Agony #78

It's Schliemann time!

This week's pair of games are by John Chernoff, an American who lives in Arcata, California, which is roughly 300 miles north of San Francisco. He got in touch with me at the beginning of this month with five games nicely annotated and with very amusing introductions. (My lead time is very short at the moment so please do send your games in!)

He writes:

Ruy Lopez: Attack with the Schliemann

In this DVD Sam Collins provides a complete and detailed repertoire for Black. Numerous novelties and improvements are suggested, with the conclusion that White has no clear route to an opening advantage.

I was born in 1973 and work as a pianist for a Humboldt State University.

Outside of chess, my hobbies include reading, writing, programming, and cheese. Well, the cheese is basically just something I eat, but still.  Perhaps of some interest might be a chess to music application I'm currently working on. I am also developing an financial chart to music program that I will likely call "Stockhausen", but I digress.

Being in such an isolated area has limited my OTB chess, but I am fairly active online as "ZugAddict" and "GargleBlaster".  For the latter I've a chess blog which I haven't written for in years but sometimes think of resuming. I'm also considering starting a web page as I hear that's now definitely a thing people do.

Oh, one other thing — during my brief visit to Europe (and England, which I have on good authority to, in spite of recent developments, still be technically part of Europe) in 2011 I did post something to the English Chess Forum about my initial impressions of the Old World which turned out to generate a very small flash of notoriety and, more importantly, a free banana on my board for the first round of the 2011 Guernsey Open.

Of the five games, I've chosen one disastrous Agony and a nice victory and I may well use some of the others anon. We start with the Agony and as usual, I've added my comments as JS.

Click or tap the second game in the game list below the board to switch

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See also:

• Previous column: Speelman's Agony #77
• All Speelman's Agony columns