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Chessville
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Elephant Gambit - Hitting Back with 2…d5!? Reviewed by Rick Kennedy
There was a
little girl, When she
was good,
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Peter Tart, chess expert and Elephant Gambit aficionado who is the principal author of Elephant Gambit, (the site says the book was “edited by Andrew Martin”) has played that rowdy line for years. In this eBook he has gathered together up-to-date Elephantia (primarily 3.exd5 Bd6 and 3.Nxe5 Bd6) and added his own suggestions, including some TNs (theoretical novelties) here and there. Even those familiar with this Queen’s Pawn Counter Gambit will find much to love.
Delivering the information in a ChessBase file format means that readers can view the text, analysis and games (81, almost all from 1995-2006) with their database (e.g. ChessBase) or playing software (e.g. Fritz) programs – which will provide a diagram for every move, as well as a handy electronic pal to help analyze positions and even play against, if need be. Tart has taken advantage of ChessBase’s ability to add colored squares and arrows to a position, to highlight important squares and threats as he explains things – very cool. A supplemental ChessBase file of 1068 additional Elephant Gambit games gives the reader plenty more to delve into.
All the information from the main ChessBase file is also available in an Adobe .pdf file, which can be read on the computer with the freely available Adobe Reader, and printed out (26 pages), as well, to provide a more book-like book. Having reviewed both kinds of eBook formats, I like it that Tart didn’t make me choose one or the other for Elephant Gambit, but provided both.
Masters may scoff at such an opening (Didn’t Staunton lose with it in the 1840s? Didn’t Morphy slap it down in the 1850s? etc.), and wonder why such efforts were put into the project. But club players will recognize a secret weapon when they see it, and agree with Martin who wrote in the Foreword:
The eBook is easily purchased and downloaded from the Andrew Martin Chess Academy website. Registration is required first, but it is free and takes less than a minute. PayPal is accepted.
So, what of the persnickety Dr. Jekyll side of things?
For starters, there are just too many misspelled and uncapitalized words, missing punctuation and run-on sentences. If Andrew Martin really edited Elephant Gambit, then I’m Kamran Shirazi. I realize that ChessBase doesn’t have spell or grammar checkers (even the .pdf file has at the top of every page “ChessBase 9.0 Printout, John Upham, 01/01/2007” – Upham is listed on the Andrew Martin Chess Academy website as an “IT Consultant”) but the errors look of carelessness or hurry in any event. Peter Tart’s personal files on the Elephant Gambit can be as casual as he would like them to be, but if he’s going to publish and ask others to pay him for those files, it’s reasonable to expect some tidying up.
There is also the oversight of using a place-saving “xxx” and forgetting to fill in the reference later, as in “has become popular in recent times due to an article in xxx giving this line as the most promising…”
None of the above shortcomings seriously undermine the reader’s ability to appreciate Tart’s analysis, but keeping the Adobe .pdf file in ChessBase output format means that the reader must be familiar with how ChessBase organizes a “tree of variations” in order to follow along without difficulty. The author makes use of different colored fonts in the ChessBase .cbv file, and this helps transitions among lines of play when following along on the computer. However, with the black-and-white .pdf file (printed or viewed) the lines branch from bold type to lines within brackets to lines set off with A), B) and C) – any one of which might be further divided into A1, A2, etc. It’s easy to get lost. In addition, when following text, this can lead to disrupted paragraphs, or even broken sentences. For example, page 4 has “…the game continued” followed by “A1) but I suggest that Black may have an improvement with…” and it is only when the reader gets to “A2)” that he can see how the sentence and the game ended “11…Nc6 and eventually ended in a draw…”
A chess database can do wonders to organize material, but it needs the help of a word processing or page layout program to make its printed output pleasing to the eye. Otherwise, the product risks looking like, well, a database dump.
More troubling than all of the above, however, is how often Tart’s words closely parallel those of Tim Harding, in his Chess Cafe column (The Kibitzer) “We’re Going on An Elephant Hunt” on a few occasions, and much more so those of Jonathan Rogers in his Winning with the Elephant Gambit. Perhaps it is simply a case of close paraphrasing, but a few examples will illustrate my concerns.
There are more examples at hand, but that should suffice. On a couple of occasions Tart does mention Rogers by name when introducing a line of play, but he gives no indication that his eBook structure (choice of lines, order of lines) resembles that of Winning with the Elephant Gambit, nor does he use quotation marks to identify Rogers’ words. Tart needs to either paraphrase even more loosely than he does, or he needs to make the proper attributions.
It feels like “piling on” to mention that the website’s description of the available eBooks overstates items 3, 4 and 5 when it comes to Elephant Gambit:
Each eBook typically contains the following content: Introduction & Background Ideas Basic Principles Annotated Examples Training Exercises Quiz Questions Game Archive to include the latest update of the TWIC Archive
The lines provided in Elephant Gambit are attributed to no particular games or players, and the games provided are not annotated. There are no Training Exercises or Quiz Questions.
On the other hand, although the “Our Shop” portion of the website states that purchasers should indicate their interest in either .cbv or .pdf files, a post by John Upham in the Forum section says that “You will get both the .cbv and .pdf versions”.
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