A Completely Pointless Refutation of Four Move Checkmate

So here's a bit of a fun question: If you're ever playing chess and your opponent opens with the

move

Pawn to E4 and you respond with Pawn to E5, there's always the chance that your opponent will try to beat you as quickly as possible. and if they want to win in just

four

move

s, the opponent will play Queen to H5 and this is known as the wayward Queen attack, Parham attack, Scholars mate patzer,

four

move opening, Checkmate, it has many names but it what you want Call it, this is, in essence, one of the simplest and crudest plans available to White and the plan is obviously very simple: you play Bishop to C4, attack F7 twice and then play Queen takes F7 giving a

checkmate

and so on.

It's like a lot of beginners lose the game as soon as possible and it's very popular, you might think it's just for kids, it's like Scholastic chess, you can win a lot of games, maybe it's like tournaments for super beginners, you would never see someone very good playing this, but you would. be

completely

wrong because if you look at the Masters database you will see that Magnus Carlson played it with white Magnus Carlson again Hikaru Nakamura five or six times you will see Nakamura playing this it has actually been played by many very decent players in very reasonable tournaments so which is something you should be prepared for no matter what level of qualification you have and you might also want to be a little surprised.

Here's another little fact: the average player rating of someone who actually plays. Queen at H5 is about 1800, so it's a lot stronger than you think and you should be prepared for it. You have to have something, but in this video I'm not going to just give you the standard textbook antidote to the four movements. Checkmate. I'm going to show you something that is a

completely

useless rebuttal: it may not objectively be the best way to play with black, but it is a very dangerous and ultimately very rare thing, and many opponents could make mistakes. up, if you can get this now, that's how we get there.

We need to perform a couple of standard movements before we can get to our starting position. Now let's also take note that this queens on E5 as we add the first attacker against our F7. The pawn is also attacking the E5 wordplay, so the standard move here is Knight to C6, you want to be able to develop your pieces, you want to be able to protect your e-pawn, but now white plays Bishop to C4 and again all we have to do. every time in every position every time you play an opening E4 E5 you always count how many times F7 attacks and here it is attacked twice and only defended once by our King so we need this queen to move away so we will be playing. this move Pawn to G6 and now the queen will have to move uh we have protected our Pawn F7 for now this Pawn is completely protected so the queen will go back to F3 and this is something that will always happen reliably every time someone tries to give kill the Scholars They will try again as if you stopped it once but you know what they try again and sometimes perseverance is rewarded and sometimes players with black pieces tend to make mistakes on this move but now This is where I am.

I'm going to share with you something particularly interesting because the standard textbook answer is to play the very natural move Knight to F6 and this is not what we are going to talk about here today, but if you want to know how to get a very reasonable position against the scholar's companion, you play Knight to F6 and this way the Knight protects your knight pawn is protected by the queen and you will get a very good position and it is worth noting that you are threatening Knight with D4 at the moment. It would be a particularly strong move that would highlight how bad this square is at F3.

We're threatening to just attack the queen and then failing that, to somehow avoid defending against her, we're going to play D6, we're just going to develop our pieces and we're going to be castled, all the pieces are going to come up to very reasonable squares and you're going to get a good position, so it's all very well, but it turns out there's another very strange move and I got the database. here so you can see all the different ways that Black has tried to defend this F7 pawn on the square, so the F6 knight is obviously the most popular choice, but maybe you can use the queen, you can go here or here like that Maybe you can play F6, which seems a bit strange, maybe you can play Knight to D4, this is very popular and you get

checkmate

d immediately, but there is also a way at the bottom of this move from Pawn to F5, which It's only played in 0.6 percent of all games, but if you look at this win. qualifies, it has a score of 54 with an average score of 1846 uh for the black pieces and perhaps most surprisingly, this variation actually has a name, this is the Fredericksburg variation of the Parham attack and perhaps it bears the name of Freddy the F Bond, but By moving your F pawn, you are an attractive target to simply take, which is a major mistake that 75 of all players will make and that is how you could get a very good position because if they take this is very bad. for White and if he doesn't take you and play something like Knight to E2 taking into account the fact that we might be threatening something like Knight to D4 this would be the best way for White to continue, we will still end up with a very good position because at the end of the day you should never have your queen on F3, it just doesn't make sense and F5 is a very unusual and interesting way to try to punish her, but first before we show it to you. stockfish's move uh which is Knight to E2 let's start by taking a look at what's most likely to happen and this is what you're actually going to get in most of your games people are going to be facing F5 which is horrible . mistake because of this strong move from Knight to D4 and just pay attention to how well this actually scores for Black and here White needs to make an important decision because the Knight to D4 is very strong not only because it attacks this queen that is going to win. some Tempo, but also because we are attacking this C2 pawn and we are threatening this important Fork, so you will see that most players will play Queen up to D5, obviously White is always trying to checkmate us, but if you put this in an engine, you will.

Look, the best move is to play Queen to D1. This is what the engine says, but it's already minus 1.2, so we already have a very big advantage with Black, so let's take a look at both moves. Now, the best move for White is to play Queen. to D1 but here you can get a very strong position with black, you will play ponza D5, you will attack the bishop, we have established a very strong center, the d-pawn is protected by our queen, so when the bishop retreats now we can get this guy back and We sacrificed a pawn, but it was only temporary, we recovered the pawn and now we have a very strong position, we actually have more developments, we have taken out more of our pieces.

We have the huge Center and we're just going to continue, maybe Queen D7 and castling on the queen side would be a very strong way to continue. It might also be possible to simply try to develop on the king's side and castle there. If that's what you prefer but however you want to do it, this is already very comfortable for Black, so instead, most players will tend to do if you get to this position and you can see how popular it is in the base of data. This is the 37.4 percent of games in which most players will play Queen to D5 and this is really in the spirit of the opening.

If you are white and playing this, you will still try to create a thread. on F7, every turn, that's all you have in mind, you have a simple caveman idea, so as black, all we have to be able to do is defend F7 but also take care of our e-pawn and the best way to do it is with this move Queen to E7 and at first this might seem a little awkward for Black because we are putting a queen in front of our bishop, but we are not too worried about that because we are actually about to get a Big advantage here, huh , with some black pieces and the bishop always has another comfortable way to develop if we finally need it, but now we have stopped his biggest threat from white, they cannot play the Queen on F7, we have also defended this pawn, so now .

We need to take a look around and suddenly we see that it is actually Black who has a threat in this position. We are trying to take on C2, so White has to be very careful and pay attention. So what are you going to do if you were white? you would probably play Knight on A3, the Knight returns and defends the C2 Pawn. This would be a very reasonable way to go and now you have a couple of different plans available with the Black Horse F6 being the most popular or I guess actually equally likely. C6 is intended as a pawn on D5 and both are very good plans that Black could continue whether he wants to get the mass of the center right away or if he wants to develop with Tempo, which I think actually makes it very difficult for Black. white continue. from here the Knight on F6 now attacks the queen and suddenly we see that this Knight is defending this square, the Knight on D4 is defending the F3 square, so the queen has no easy way to retreat, you can't go either here.

We're not going here because of this Knight, so the only square available for the queen is to get to A5 and now we just buy a lot of time by attacking this queen as much as possible. We want to play the Pawn attack on B6. the queen again made her flee somewhere and now we can play D5, which is very popular, or the bishop on B7, why not continue to develop by attacking these pawns and if the knight ever comes out, you know we can? to tear it apart, notice how we are defending this, so something like this would give us a fantastic position, we have the Queen side of the castle, we play the Pawn on D4, we just love life, so instead what White will usually do something. like Banda F3, but obviously this can't be great either, we'll be castled, we'll play D5 and if you ask a computer, this isn't just like winning for Black, this is completely over, uh, us.

They will castle us maybe we can get this pawn back. We could even play A6, whatever we decide to do. We will have a fantastically winning position for Black. You will have massive control of the center. We are far ahead in developments and none. The white pieces really make sense, so this is a fantastic thing that could give you a lot of points, but what if the opponent plays a little better in this position and after the Pawn on F5 he doesn't get greedy? don't decide to just take this right away uh and instead play more like the computer, well the best way for White to continue is with Knight to E2 and this controls the D4 square which we saw in the previous lines that this is a huge The threat of the Knight to D4 is a big threat to Black attacking the queen but also attacking the C pawn and 92 does the best job of defending it and here I will point out that there are possibly many different ways to continue with Black, e.g. . after Knight to F6, which would be the most logical development move, I must again point out to you that it will never be possible for White to take this Pawn; we will always get a huge advantage by being able to play the Pawn on D5 establishing this huge Center and even in one of these positions, wherever the bishop decides to move, we will always be able to arrive in time to recover our Pawn and we should be very happy with the position we have obtained.

So what White really needs to focus on is the same thing we focus on, which is the same thing you should focus on every game, which is developing your pieces and castling, and the best move for White. here is developing this knight keeps more protection from this pawn and then ultimately just trying to get your stuff out and get castled so if white follows these kinds of rules I will point out that there are a lot of different ways that again here you can play with black computer. a tendency to want to play A5 tonight and go after this bishop, which seems very reasonable, but if you simply play Pawn to D6 there is another very dangerous plan in this line that you can play with black and that could actually trap many players with white pieces and this happens again after D3, White should only focus on reinforcing the center to be able to develop all the pieces, but now here it is obviously very possible that you can still play bishop until G7, you can still go after this bishop. do some of that, but you have this very clever move from the Pawn to F5 in this position and I think a move like this could fool a lot of players because it looks like you know what we're just removing, this bishop, we have to be a little bit more sensitive to the fact that White might find it easier to play Pawn to D4, but in reality we have created a very cunning threat here with Black and our plan is to play Bishop to G4 and trap the queen so that White has to be very careful because if you are not cautious we will go hereand oh, the queen has run out of squares to go to the bishop, it is defended and the queen is trapped, so what most players will do when they sense this coming is they will play Pawn to H3, this seems like a way very sensible, uh, for white to just get rid of this threat and everything seems fine, the thread disappeared, nothing to see here, it's time to move on with our lives and black, very good, would you? just start developing this guy, you could try to take these guys out, you could go after this bishop again, a lot of different things you could do, but maybe the most aggressive and dangerous weapon you have available to you as black is to play this move Pawn to G5 and this creates another threat and now this time the threat is to simply play Pawn to G4 and eh, White really needs to be able to deal with this because if you don't do anything linked, G4 is just going to trap the queen, if you get this back with the pawn, no big deal, we take with the bishop, all these squares are covered and suddenly the queen is trapped, so people need to think of something one more time and it's not really easy, the queen is very trapped. in box F3, so what happened and this only happened once?

In or at least in this position it actually happened about four times and the interesting thing is that White scores very well here after the Pawn on G4, it seems that it is White who is scoring. very good even after H5, but if you ask a computer, it's like it's between -1 and -2, like this is a very strong continuation for Black, so it's interesting that in practice White seems be going very well here, but I think uh If you get this position, you should feel very comfortable, for example, the line is here and now, strange and funny computer moves, obviously, the normal developing moves go behind this bishop are fine too, but some fun computer moves behind this pawn could also get you into a really good position, uh, the computer line is like this and then swing the queen anyway, get your stuff out, castle and never mind what, even if your opponent doesn't fall for tricks, look at this, you get a great position, so that's Fredericksburg. variation uh, what do you guys think of that?

Pawn on F5. Would you guys ever try playing the Fredericksburg variation? If you like it, make sure to subscribe, okay?