Opening

Lanes
Gary Lane
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Scary Monsters
It has a great name, but is the Frankenstein-Dracula Variation any good?
Wolfgang Schmidt from Germany e-mailed to comment, "I'm a German
chess player with an ELO around 2000. I'd like to come back to your offer of
discussing the Vienna and ask you: What is the latest opinion on the
Frankenstein-Dracula Variation?"
This is a tricky question because the Frankenstein-Dracula Variation, which
can arrive via the Vienna or Bishop's Opening, is notoriously complicated. I
would advise anyone who chooses to play it for either side to test it on
computers in correspondence play to see how it gets on. This advice would
not go down well with one of the world's greatest attacking players Shirov
whom is always up for a challenge. In the following simultaneous game the
great man was taking on thirty-three players and strangely chose not to have
white in every game, which tends to be the normal practice. Instead, he also
got to play black on alternate boards, which can make it harder for the top
player, as he soon found out.
Michel Desjardins – Alexei Shirov
RACC Simultaneous, Ottawa 2011
Vienna Game [C27]
1 e4 e5 2 Nc3 Nf6 3 Bc4 It is worth pointing out that this line, although it is
the Vienna, often occurs via the move-order 1 e4 e5 2 Bc4 Nf6 and now 3
Nc3 is played (3 d3 is also popular and I look at them both in my Batsford
book The Bishop's Opening Explained). 3…Nxe4