A great introduction to the Diemer–Duhm Gambit is now available: 10-page article by Bob Jensen. It concentrates on two critical variations:
Especially 6.fxe4 is an interesting improvement idea to the Kmoch variation:
While ecogoogling the other day, I found a funny YouTube video that presents a DDG trick for bullet (1 + 1 minute) games. The DDG game starts at 7:35.
ecogoogling googling chess openings, which are organized by ECO (Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings) codes; the term is derived from egogoogling
The trick that wins a piece goes as follows:
1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.c4
"I am playing my Duhm gambit again and again against this French Defence", says the guy on the video.
3...dxe4 4.Nc3 Nf6 5.d5?!
"Only players about 2200 fall for this, and beneath, of course; it happens very often", he continues.
I briefly mentioned this trick move in the DDG News in 2003.
5...exd5 6.cxd5 Bb4??
6...c6! -/+ busts the trick, but is hard to find in a bullet game.
7.Qa4+ Nc6 8.bxc6 +-
Jyrki Heikkinen — David Bye, e-mail, 2005
1.d4 d5 2.e4 e6 3.c4 dxe4 4.Nc3 Nf6 5.f3 exf3 6.Nxf3 Nbd7 7.Bd3 Be7 8.O-O O-O 9.Bg5 Ne8
A pretty standard DDG, but Black plays too passively.
10.Be3
The first "creative" bishop move. I didn't want to ease Black's cramped position by exchanging pieces.
10...g6 11.Qe1 Ng7 12.Rd1 f5? 13.Bh6
This bishop again. I expected Black to play f4, which would block the bishop away from the kingside.
13...Nf6 14.Bg5
The bishop maneuver g5-e3-h6-g5 looks like a novice moving a piece back and forth without a plan. I did feel myself a bit stupid after returning to g5, but now that Black has weakened dark squares with g6, I'm willing to exchange the dark bishops.
14...Re8 15.Bc2 c6 16.Ne5 Nfh5 17.Bxe7 Qxe7
18.Qe3 Bd7 19.Qh6 Rad8 20.c5
Funny that Black did not have time to play c5. I was expecting it several times. Black would have gained more space for his pieces by breaking White's center.
I wanted to play 20.Be4 fxe4 21.Rf7 Qxf7 22.Nxf7 Kxf7 23.Nxe4, which is good for White. But I didn't play 20.Be4 because it threatens nothing, and Black could play, say, 20...Qb4. Post-mortem analysis showed that 22...Nf5! ruins my variation above.
20...g5?
This move must be dubious, was my first impression. I tried to look at the position like an outsider, and asked myself: What is White's compensation for the pawn?
The answer is mobility. I evaluated the mobility of the troops by counting the number of sensible moves of each piece. I came up with the numbers 22/11, that is, White's pieces have altogether twice as many sensible moves as Black's pieces.
Rybka suggests 20...Nf6 =.
21.Ne4!
This changes "mobility numbers" to 24/9. Finding this decisive move was easy, thanks to my analysis of the move 20.Be4.
21...fxe4 22.Rf7 Qxf7 23.Nxf7 Kxf7 24.Rf1+ 1-0
Game over: 24...Nf4 25.Qxg5 or 24...Kg8 25.Bxe4 or 24...Ke7 25.Qxg5+.
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:
Happy 100th birthday! Long live the DDG!
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."
"I detest the endgame. A well-played game should be practically decided in the middlegame", said David Janowsky. That's my motto.
Having finished my first non-blitz DDG game (Heikkinen – Aapola, 1990), I was told that during the game somebody had said: "Jyrki is about to lose because he is a pawn down with no compensation."
But I'm always a pawn down, sometimes even more – that's how I play chess. Those unbalanced positions are familiar to me. My opponents often overestimate their position, and play as if they were clearly winning. That's when I hit. I love to attack; when I'm an underdog, I keep looking for my opponent's mistake that allows me to start an attack.
If you only try to desperately equalize in the gambit, you should not play the DDG or BDG at all. There are many normal openings that give a small advantage for White.
In the following game I played one of my most adventurous piece sacrifice ever.
Jyrki Heikkinen – Rebel Decade, London 1996
1.d4 Nf6 2.f3 d5 3.e4 dxe4 4.c4 e6 5.Nc3
This is one way to transpose to the DDG 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.c4 dxe4 4.Nc3 Nf6 5.f3.
5...c5 6.d5 exd5 7.cxd5 exf3 8.Nxf3 Bd6 9.Bb5+ Nbd7 10.O-O O-O 11.Bg5 h6 12.Bh4 Re8 13.Nd2!? g5 14.Nc4 Bf8
15.Qf3!?
This intuitive sacrifice was too tempting to miss. Its consequences are surprisingly difficult to calculate.
15...gxh4 16.Bxd7 Nxd7 17.Qxf7+ Kh8 18.d6 (18.Qg6 looks also promising) 18...Bg7
Black is running out of moves: the queen's rook and bishop are useless, and also other pieces have little space. But is this position worth a piece?
19.Nd5 h3 (19...Rf8 -+) 20.Ne7 hxg2 (20...Bd4+ 21.Kh1 hxg2+ -+) 21.Rf5 Rb8? (21...Rg8 -+) 22.Re1 (22.Rh5 works as well) 22...Rg8 23.Re6
23...Nf6 24.Rfxf6 Bxe6 25.Qxe6 Bxf6 (25...Kh7 26.Qf5+ mates) 26.Qxf6+ Kh7 27.Qf5+ Kh8 28.Ne5 Qe8 (it's over) 29.Nf7+ Qxf7 30.Qxf7 Rg7 31.Qf6 Kh7 32.Nf5 Rg4 33.d7 Ra8 34.Qxh6+ Kg8 35.Qe6+ Kh8 36.d8R+ Rxd8 37.Qf6+ Kh7 38.Qxd8 1-0
The history of the DDG has been blurry. The name of the opening was coined by Emil Joseph Diemer, who referred to German Andreas Duhm (1883-1975), who won Swiss Championships three times in 1900-1913. I only knew his one correspondence game against Martin from 1909.
Bernd van der Meulen shed more light on the history when he wrote to me recently: "It has been a pleasant surprise to find out through your [DDG] website that the name of my grand-uncle Andreas Duhm is connected to a chess opening."
Bernd's article on the early history of the DDG will be published soon in Kaissiber. The article contains four Duhm games, three of which were played in a correspondence tournament, which started on September 23, 1907. "It seems fair to say that the DDG was born on that date", Bernd wrote.
So the DDG centennial will be in September 2007! I guess I should start planning something special for it.
This blog is dedicated to crazy gambits. Playing chess for over 20 years, I still haven't learned to respect material. You could call me goal-oriented: I start thinking about checkmate from the first move. In other words, I attack and sacrifice like crazy.
I have always played dubious gambits such as Diemer-Duhm (DDG) and Fajarowicz. Blackmar-Diemer (BDG) has been my main weapon for ten years.
The idea of creating this blog came suddenly, actually today. I have no master plan, but simply plan to publish some of my games, analysis, views, ideas.
In the early days of the Web in 1994 I created the DDG pages, and kept updating them regularly for many years. I have been too lazy to update them since 2003. This blog will replace the DDG News that I started to publish there.
There was a small but active on-line community of DDG players in the late 1990s: we played DDG e-mail tournaments, had lively discussions, analyzed each other's games. I hope this blog helps revive the DDG community.
Some time ago I started to play with an idea of moving the useful content (selected opening analysis, some games and articles) from the DDG pages to a wiki, so that anybody could easily update it. Is there an existing chess wiki where the DDG stuff would fit in?
