Thursday 13 September 2018

QGD

A couple of days ago I was idly browsing chess books on Amazon and wondered what they had on the Queen's Gambit Declined, which I play, on the White side, extremely badly. I used the search term QGD, which is a mistake if you're looking for chess books (as, for different reasons, is QGA). But although it gets you no books, QGD will get you some kind of chess. This kind.


Yes, yes, the right-hand square, but who names a song after the Queen's Gambit Declined anyway? It might be (if I recall correctly) the only opening Kasparov and his team didn't think they could prove an advantage against, but as that doesn't seem to be the particular angle that the song is taking, I wrote to the artist to ask.

He replied:
I was learning a bit of chess and I thought QGD (for Queen's Gambit Declined) would be a cool song title. The song is kind of based around the idea of not taking something offered to you at face value - which I think is the point of QGD in chess - it's better for black in the long run to not accept the proffered pawn. I'm not amazing at chess though, so hopefully I didn't get that wrong.
Well don't worry mate, none of us are, and wrong is what we get it most of the time.

Anyway, I mostly divide my musical time between various periods of classical music and various iterations of folk, so I might not be quite the audience for this particular number. Play it, though, via the link above, and see what you think.

But this is still my favourite.

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