Since first becoming interested in the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit—almost forty years ago now—I’ve collected just about anything I could find on the opening, on Blackmar, on Diemer. Books, magazine articles, photos. correspondence, whatever. Scoresheets—here’s one I scanned from the original.
This is Diemer's scoresheet of one of a series of BDGs he played with Manfred Kloss in August 1959. On the back page he wrote:
A typical BDG game!
The sword of Damocles has won more victories than the sword of Caesar. (Khrushchev)
The goddess of victory surrenders only to he who courts her with strong will. (de Gaulle)
That’s heavy stuff, but I think it’s still okay to play the game just for the fun of it. No, really!
Mondays are fun days here. I look forward to the crop of games from The Week in Chess. Today’s issue brought forth more BDGs and close relatives than usual, but a mixed bag of wins, losses, and draws (how chess-like). I didn’t find anything especially of interest: no theoretical innovations, no spectacular combinations, not even an entertaining blunder of note. See if you agree.
The photo of old BDG friends which I posted recently induced me to review the battle between Diemer and Gunter Müller, Biel 1975, which Gunter annotated for BDG WORLD 25 in December 1986. I’ve retained Gunter’s original notes and augmented them with a few of my own (indicated with ***), assisted by computer analysis and tablebases which were of course not readily available almost a quarter century ago.
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | ||
| 8 | 8 | ||||||||
| 7 | 7 | ||||||||
| 6 | 6 | ||||||||
| 5 | 5 | ||||||||
| 4 | 4 | ||||||||
| 3 | 3 | ||||||||
| 2 | 2 | ||||||||
| 1 | 1 | ||||||||
 |
A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H |
| Helin, M. 1972 - Aerni, A. 2137 |
| 0-1 (8th Gibtelecom Masters) 1/26/2010 |
