MY round-seven game in the Bad Wörishofen seniors was an Old Indian that began 1.e4 d6 2.d4 Nf6 3.f3!? e5 4.d5 c6 5.c4 Qb6 6.Qb3 Be7 7.Be3 Qxb3 8.axb3, reaching the following position.
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| Spanton (1919) - Dieter Bauer (1798) after 8.axb3 - notice anything unusual? |
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The unusual feature is that queens have come off the board before anything else.
There are 11.7million games in ChessBase's 2026 Mega database - have a go at guessing how many feature the same phenomenon of queens-off first.
A) 35,222 (0.3%)
B) 58,715 (0.5%)
C) 82,202 (0.7%)
D) 105,688 (0.9%)
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The answer is 35,222 games, which is 0.3% of the games in Mega26.
I have a database with 5,028 of my games, and, since this was the sixth time queens have come off first in those games, my percentage is the even tinier 0.1.
The openings in my games varied: two Rétis and one each of the King's Indian Attack, Slav, Liberated Bishop and Old Indian.
But they have in common that, with the arguable exception of the King's Indian Attack, they were all closed systems.
Interesting quiz. My guess (0.5%) was wrong, but when I checked my games, it turned out to be almost exactly my ratio (7 out of 1420 games). My openings were 5 times Slav setup against the Catalan, one French and one Stonewall. In all the games it occurred after the Qb3+Qb6 setup.
ReplyDeleteYes, without looking into it, I would guess many - probably most - examples would come from Qb3/...Qb6
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