Talk:Grob's Attack

message: I'm not a Grob player, so I'm not up on this.  In the variation mentioned in the article, 1.g4 d5 2.Bg2 Bxg4? 3.c4, does 2...Bxg4? really deserve the question mark?  I think this move is played by some strong players (at least the ones who like to snatch pawns), and so perhaps a more accurate assessment might be 2...Bxg4!?.  Any thoughts?  Quale 21:05, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Changed accordingly. Also, "spike opening" only gets 910 hits on google, of which the first 9 out of 10 have nothing to do with chess. I suspect that this may be a very limited regional reference, and as such has no business in this article. I have removed it accordingly. Themindset 09:32, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  "Spike Opening" refers to the label Grob applied to this opening in his newspaper column.As such, I am going to reinstate this aspect of the wiki.  RBPierce 17:05, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: MCO 14 refers to a specific variation as the spike J. M. 07:54, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Old talk

message: Why is Grob's only used for white? I've tried it a lot and it works pretty well for black too. Dan Guan 04:23, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: "Grob's Attack" is the name given to the opening move 1.g4. By definition it's an opening for White. 1.e4 g5 is a different opening, sometimes called the Borg defence (from "Grob" spelled backwards) or the Basman defence (after Michael Basman). 213.249.135.36 20:26, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Only white? 

message: This is 1. g4 d5 2. Bg2 Bxg4 3. c4 d4 4. Bxb4 Nd7 5. Bxa8 Qxa8 6. f3 d3. At the moment there is a diagram of the position after 6...d3 but no explanation or discussion of this line in the article. 91.105.5.242 02:51, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Romford Countergambit 

message: Hello, 
#I'm sorry, but my English is terrible
#In article is written "In Czechoslovakia 1.g4 is called Fric's Opening..."
##Czechoslovakia end in 1992, now it's Czech Republic and Slovak Republic
##I'm from Czech Republic and i know something about chess and chess openings, but i never heard "Fric Opening".
--78.102.195.5 (talk) 11:40, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Czech animadversion 

message: This article currently has no discussion of 1. g4 d5 2. Bg2 c6, which I thought was the main line. 91.107.140.122 (talk) 20:19, 11 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  2...c6 

message: Why is there a section on Fool's Mate here? Fool's Mate can also arise from Bird's Opening but that article doesn't even mention it -- and rightly so, since Fool's Mate is a curiosity with no relevance to actual play. Worse, this section makes it sound like the only reason for 1... e5 after 1. g4 is the hope of Fool's Mate; this is far from true as some writers recommend 1... e5 as the best response. 91.107.160.156 (talk) 20:48, 7 July 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I tend to agree.  I'll cut it down to one sentence and put it in the see also.  Bubba73 (You talkin' to me?), 21:17, 7 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fool's mate 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: User:Fasscass has added a question mark to the very first occurrence of 1. g4 in this article.
This was discussed briefly in that editor's talk page, but I am trying to move the discussion here.
A few years ago, in this talk page, there was an argument about how the quotation from John Watson was to be treated in this article.  Watson echoes a common opinion, that 1. g4 is just a bad move.  The outcome was that we are quoting him, without any special qualification, although we also note that there have been masters, such as Grob and Michael Basman, who liked 1. g4.
Putting our own question mark on 1. g4, as opposed to quoting Watson, is "speaking in Wikipedia's voice".   As a rule, this is not credible.  Wikipedia is a bunch of anonymous guys sitting at computer terminals.  Why should any reader give credence to Wikipedia's opinion?  So if there is a question mark, as a rule, there should be a citation to a reliable source.
This is why there aren't too many question marks and exclams in the articles about chess openings.  A footnoted reference to a reliable source is a lot of trouble to go to, just for a thumbs-up or thumbs-down opinion.  Bruce leverett (talk) 13:56, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Can't cite chapter and verse but apparently Larsen (hardly a conventional player) gives it a question mark, so that's pretty damning. Still, it's hard to argue that reliable sources in general assign the move a question mark. A ?! or a !? maybe. But there isn't really a RS consensus that 1.g4 is a ? move. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 14:25, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

text: I haven’t played competitive chess for years which means my knowledge of the assessment of the move is probably way outdated. However, if reliable sources disagree on how it should be assessed, then the “?” seems inappropriate. Perhaps something about this disagreement should be added to the article as properly cited and attributed text or expanded upon if already there to reflect any recent developments (e.g. sourced critical commentary of recent assessments made by computers), but it seems a bad idea, in principle, to add “!”, “?” and the like to moves in Wikipedia articles unless they are part of a complete game score where a move might be assessed in a specific context. Wikipedia articles, in my opinion, aren’t chess opening books per se even though many may see and use them as such in some way. The addition of the “?” was a :WP:BOLD edit made in good faith, but reverting per :WP:STATUSQUO and :WP:BRD is also something that can be done in good faith. The :WP:ONUS still falls upon the person who wants to make the edit to establish a consensus for doing so if others disagree and there’s no strong policy or guideline based reason the edit needs to be made. — Marchjuly (talk) 22:29, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Do we accept Stockfish and Leela as reliable sources? I don't see why not since they're stronger than any human, but if we do then we can easily cite engine analysis for the question mark. Banedon (talk) 02:02, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: That's the thing, we don't accept engine analysis as reliable sources. Unless it's published in a reliable source, it's original research.  WP:CHESSENGINE - yeah I wrote it but it reflects current wp chess and wikipedia consensus. WP:CHESSNOTATION is also relevant. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 02:26, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

text: As I read them, both WP:SPS and WP:RSSELF pretty clearly discourage you from using a comment in a blog post as if it were a reliable source.  They make an allowance for a comment by an "established subject-matter expert, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications."  But Kaufman is not an expert in the Grob attack and has never (AFAIK) published about that opening.  What were you thinking? Bruce leverett (talk) 22:28, 11 June 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: He has. In The Kaufman Repertoire for Black and White he wrote (p. 8):  I admit that he never wrote a whole book about the Grob, but has any GM? Double sharp (talk) 23:08, 11 June 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: This is at least from an actual published book, but, come on, it doesn't look very substantial.  I'm not trying to defend the Grob, I'm just trying to avoid using silly lightweight sources. Bruce leverett (talk) 01:49, 12 June 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: This is kind of a catch-22, isn't it? Authors who don't think the Grob deserves to be taken seriously are hardly going to give it any more weight than that. Given that the the average opinion of strong players is that 1.g4 is just a bad move (e.g. Schiller and Benjamin, Watson, Martin; or more briefly, van der Sterren FCO, Carlsen in an interview, Keene), ignoring them pretty much means taking it more seriously than average opinion thinks it deserves. (BTW van der Sterren treats it even less substantially than Kaufman: he doesn't even give it the dignity of naming it.) Now I admit that Kaufman in his post is going even beyond this average level of condemnation by saying that it might be on the brink of theoretically lost. But I think it's not really problematic to use opening repertoires as sources when they cursorily dismiss 1.g4. Indeed, that's probably the best place you could find the average current strong-player opinion on this first move, which seems to be that it is worth being cursorily dismissed. Double sharp (talk) 10:03, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

text: Who even runs that site, and what engines do they even use? There's just no indication anywhere that it's a reliable source. The broader principle that we should be writing about openings from a human point of view stands too. "Centipawn" is not a normal chess term. If there is a reliable source that specifically says "engine X considers 1.g4 White's worst possible opening move" that would be ok, but not this mess. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 21:43, 13 June 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Unfortunately I cannot find anyone saying that. Even Kaufman's suggestion that 1.g4 might be close to the border between drawn and lost is just in that forum post, and consensus here apparently doesn't see that as falling under the exception in WP:SPS. But I suppose Kaufman is not sure even there, so not much information is lost if we omit it. Double sharp (talk) 22:17, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

text: It's not going on the page, but reading the last pages of that forum thread shows that Kaufman apparently changed his mind this year to the "1.g4 is probably a forced win for Black" side:  So for now I suppose we do nothing, and add that iff he ever publishes that result in one of his books. Double sharp (talk) 22:24, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

text: The site/database is run by Bojun Guo and the engine used is Stockfish. The info pages do a bad job of explaining how it works though. I'm told it's not "standard" Stockfish to high depth, which does prefer 1. e4, 1. d4 and 1. Nf3. Instead it does something like "conduct a brief search, then explore all the five best moves, then go back and explore the three best moves" - something like that. The goal is to explore the opening tree, not to find the best moves (see info pages). That's why it is exploring 1. g4 since left to its own devices Stockfish will prune that move. But it's still surprising to me that the most common first moves are rated 0.00, and for the purposes of claiming the Grob is busted DBCN might not be the best database to cite either since one would rather run normal Stockfish on 1. g4 to high depth. Banedon (talk) 23:47, 13 June 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I have removed the sentence citing that database – violation of WP:NOR and WP:INDISCRIMINATE. Cobblet (talk) 13:41, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

text: They just mean that one side has an advantage, scaled so that 1 point is roughly the sort of advantage you'd get for being up a pawn without compensation. Naturally if chess were solved we could ditch those, but since we can't, they at least provide some kind of guide. If you're up +1 you're obviously more likely to win than if you're up +0.5. So you can think of them as roughly correlating to expected winning percentages from that position (obviously assuming the resulting play is conducted with some level of common sense). That's why Kaufman can say in that post that 1.g4 is likely lost for White given the eval, while also admitting that no one can prove it. But I suppose this is kind of moot until/unless he publishes it in somewhere more reliable. Double sharp (talk) 22:50, 13 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question mark 

message: "The Grob was played in the superfinal of the 12th Top Chess Engine Championship season" - wasn't exactly "played" in the sense that any of the engines actually chose that move, it was rather one of the predetermined openings. 93.139.157.19 (talk) 23:20, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Played" in TCEC 

message: Do we really need all these names that Eric Schiller or whoever made up for lines that nobody plays? MaxBrowne2 (talk) 23:40, 10 November 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: The larger question is, how do we judge whether the name of an opening or of a variation belongs in Wikipedia?  We have all discussed the notion of "reliable source" many times, but, looking through our articles about openings, I think there are various places where we don't cite a reliable source for the claim that such-and-such variation has the name so-and-so.  This problem presumably comes up in areas of intellectual endeavor other than chess, and I wonder how they handle it, and if they handle it more or less haphazardly than we do. Bruce leverett (talk) 03:48, 11 November 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Any variation names not found in standard recognized works should require two reliable and independent sources.  Reddit, online chess forums, Twitter, and any YouTube videos not produced by FIDE GMs are automatically disqualified as sources.  Quale (talk) 06:09, 12 November 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: The platforms like chess.com, lichess, chesstempo etc tend to copy each other and perpetuate names like the Coca Cola Gambit that you'll never find in any reputable chess book. There are a lot of "internet names". MaxBrowne2 (talk) 06:18, 12 November 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Right, and silliness in wikipedia gets copied into other websites.  Those are then cited as sources and the dubious claims become firmly rooted in wikipedia and are hard to remove.  Quale (talk) 00:05, 13 November 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: The name "Romford Countergambit" is given by Joel Benjamin and Eric Schiller in the 1987 book Unorthodox Openings, where it is credited to Romford, Essex player Nick Pelling. That one looks reasonably well established. The earliest reference I found to "Coca Cola Gambit" was a German forum post from 2008, with no print sources, or really any reliable sources at all for the name. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 22:59, 13 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stupid lines that nobody plays