How The Openings Got Their Names - Mar Del Plata

FELLOW Battersea Chess Club member Joe Skielnik returned earlier this month from a tournament in Spain where a mutual friend "had a couple of games on the white side of the King's Indian, Mar del Plata Variation."
Joe asks: "It appears it was first played in Najdorf v Gligoric, 1953, in Mar del Plata. However, I thought it might have had something to do with the carnage arising from the Battle of the River Plate in 1939, which sometimes appears similar to what happens on the chessboard in this line.
"Unfortunately I can find no connection, so only a mysterious coincidence?"
The Mar del Plata Variation is an important line of the King's Indian that arises after the moves 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.Nf3 0-0 6.Be2 e5 7.0-0 Nc6 8. d5 Ne7.

Starting tabiya of the Mar del Plata

There are more than 3,000 games with this position in ChessBase's 2019 Mega database, and the Mar del Plata is important enough to get its own chapter - the first - in Robert Bellin & Pietro Ponzetto's classic Mastering The King's Indian With The Read And Play Method (Batsford, 1990).
The variation is named after a tournament held in 1953 in the Argentine coastal resort of  Mar del Plata, where Gligoric used the black side of the variation to beat Najdorf and Eliskases, and Najdorf was later held to a draw in the same variation by Trifunovic.
But the moves had been known since the 1920s at least, becoming suddenly fashionable in 1952 when it was played at the olympiad in Helsinki and in the Soviet and Hungarian championships.
At first the variation did not do well for Black - Taimanov with the white pieces beat both Aronin and Bronstein in the 1952 Soviet championship.
It was Black's success with the variation in Argentina that gained it the name Mar del Plata (the name of the city literally translates from Spanish as Sea of Silver, but in this case Plata refers to the country's Plata region rather than directly to silver or the River Plate - Rio de la Plata in Spanish).
Here is one of the variation's less-successful outings.
Ivan Nemet (GM2412) - Spanton (2250*)
Simul, Villars-sur-Ollon, 2001
1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.Nf3 0-0 6.Be2 e5 7.0-0 Nc6 8.d5 Ne7 9.Ne1
This was White's response from the earliest days of the variation, although its popularity has been challenged by 9.b4. The idea of both moves is to press on with c5 (after Nd3 or Be3 in the case of 9.Ne1) and to attack on the queenside before Black can organise a mating attack on the kingside.
9...Nd7 10.Be3
This has become more popular than the immediate Nd3.
10...f5 11.f3 f4 12.Bf2 g5 13.Rc1 h5 14.c5 Nf6?
Correct was 14...Nxc5, and if 15.b4, the move I was worried about, then 15...Na6. Black need not fear 16.Bxa6?! bxa6 as Black's kingside attack is enhanced by the absence of White's light-square bishop.
15.cxd6 cxd6 16.Nb5 Ne8 17.Nxa7 Kh8
17...Bd7 was played in Stefan Docx (2384) - Slavisa Brenjo (2495), European Championship 2009, but 18.Qb3 Ng6 19.Qxb7 Rb8 20.Nc6 stopped Black getting a strong-enough attack to compensate for his disappeared queenside (1-0, 37 moves).
18.Nxc8 Rxc8 19.Rxc8 Qxc8 20.Nd3 Rg8 21.Kh1 Bf8 22.Qc1 Qd7 23.Qc3 g4??
A blunder, but Black's kingside attack is getting nowhere anyway.
The remaining moves were:
24.Nxf4 Nf6 25.Ne6 gxf3? 26.Qxf3 Ng4? 27.Nxf8 1-0
*My Swiss rating at the time.

Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Junior?

RECEIVED the following email earlier in the week from fellow Battersea-member Joe Skielnik:

I was interested in your recent blog about playing juniors which reminded me of my own experience. Here is an extract from a recent article on Chessbase that you might have already seen?

Players develop particularly rapidly between the age of 10 to 18 but in these years you now only gain Elo points from other players (unlike previously). Some of these rating points come from junior players who quit chess. However, because the playing strength of virtually all junior players increases from the age of 10 to the age of 18 years these junior players mainly gain rating points from adult opponents who "sponsor" the ratings of the juniors. As a result a lot of players ranging from 1000 to 2000 Elo points are underrated which also affected higher Elo levels.

The full article is here  https://en.chessbase.com/post/problems-of-calculating-ratings-of-junior-players

Strange that FIDE are aware of the problem but seem unable to resolve it. Perhaps the answer is just to add 100-200 rating points according to age.

I think there is no doubt:
a) Juniors improve more quickly than adults, and so at any point in their development are more likely than adults to be underrated;
b) As the article contends, juniors improve with (almost) every tournament they play;
c) If a tournament is an all-junior affair, the average rating of the participants will not change even though each one of them has (probably) improved;
d) When such juniors later play in tournaments not restricted by age, their adult opponents are going to get an undeservedly lowered rating performance.
So what can be done about this?
Joe's suggestion of adding points to a rating according to age is similar to how the ECF/BCF used to treat juniors in its grading system. It may be the answer, but I am not statistically expert enough to know.
What I do know is that many adults exacerbate the problem by taking a defeatist attitude to playing juniors.
They expect to get outplayed tactically, so they either:
a) Fail to give the game a 100 percent effort, and so their fear of being outplayed tactically becomes self-fulfilling; or
b) Try to avoid complications at all costs and end up playing so passively that their young opponents get to build winning attacks unhindered.
There is no doubt most juniors are much stronger tactically than positionally. A junior rated 1700 could easily have a tactical strength of 2000, but positionally be little better than 1400.
This is why an old adage has it that the best way to play against juniors is to get queens off as soon as possible, even at the cost of positional concessions.
It might also be a good idea - I have no authority for this - to try opposite-side castling if reasonably possible.
This may sound counter-intuitive as such positions often lead to rival attacks, but my point is that many key decisions players have to make in such games are of a positional nature, eg when to make a move on the side of the board where you  are attacking, and when to make a move on the side of the board where you are defending.
Once you reach a certain age, another way to get back rating points you have been "robbed" of is to play in tournaments restricted to seniors.
Just as almost all juniors are underrated, so almost all seniors are overrated, as is evidenced by a gradual decline in their ratings.
Perhaps surprisingly, this can be especially true with titled players. This is because Fide has privileged the best players with a lower K factor, meaning their rating drops more slowly than non-titled players of the same strength.
But at the end of the day I suspect the best antidote to juniors is to have the right mental attitude, and to remember that they may well be afraid of your (hopefully) superior positional skills, as well as quite possibly being more nervous as a natural consequence of their immaturity.