DDG 100 years

On September 23, 1907, started the 15th Swiss Correspondence Championship, in which Andreas Duhm opened three games as White with 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.e4 dxe4 4.Nc3. Evidently, those games are the first recorded Diemer-Duhm Gambit games; the opening was named almost a half a century later by Emil Josef Diemer.

For a little-known gambit, a second cousin of the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit, the DDG is doing fine nowadays. Since 1995, the DDG has been made known both online and offline:

• Brause by Steffen A. Jakob has been playing the DDG at Internet Chess Servers.
• Several thematic DDG e-mail tournaments have been organized.
• DDG variations have been analyzed on discussion boards.
• Articles on the DDG have been published in the magazines of Tom Purser (Blackmar-Diemer Gambit World) and Tim Harding (Chess Mail).
• The DDG has been briefly covered in the books of Tim Harding (Four Gambits To Beat The French), Eric Schiller (Unorthodox Chess Openings, Gambit Chess Openings) and Sarah Hurst (Chess on the Web).

Happy 100th birthday! Long live the DDG!

That priceless look

The best DDG game I have seen for a long time is Tart – Foster, 2004.

The game includes the "Sacrifice of the Season". The amazing move 14.Ng5!! reminds me of my game Heikkinen - Bongiovanni, corr. 1999, which ended in the same move.

Peter Tart sent me some of his DDG games already ten years ago. He wrote that he used to have nothing exciting/shocking/fun to play against the French, but once he discovered the DDG, the fun started.

I know the feeling he once wrote about: "The look on Black's face when you play c4 is priceless."