Owen's Defense | Suffocating the Enemy King!

#OwensDefense #OpeningPrinciples 

At the beginner-intermediate level, you will occasionally face openings that you are unfamiliar with.  Some of these will not be bad openings, just less common, though sometimes they will be a bit obscure.

One of the lessons that I've learnt over the last few years is to simply follow general opening principles when facing an unfamiliar opening!  There are "principles" for a reason, and "going creative" in somebody else's opening experience rarely goes well!

In this match, my opponent with the black pieces played Owen's Defense (1. e4 b6), which I had encountered only a small number of times before, though none which I could actively recall during the game.  Eric Schiller in his book, Unorthodox Chess Openings (1998) had this to say about the Owen Defense:

"The Owen Defense has virtually disappeared from serious tournaments, though there are efforts by some die-hard fans to bring it back to life.  White can grab the entire center.  There are a few trappy lines, and these often lead to quick victories for Black, but most of them are double-edged and White comes out on top with accurate play." (p. 323)

In this game, I simply attempted to play the opening solidly.  I take the full centre with my central pawns, develop both knights, develop my king's bishop, and castle king-side on move 6.  According to Stockfish, White had an advantage of roughly [+1] demonstrating that simple adherence to opening principles against more unorthodox openings is a fine tactic.  Indeed, although the evaluation fluctuates a bit, I'm pretty much ahead on evaluation over the entire game!

Against me taking the centre and developing quickly, Black sacrificed both of their bishops for my knights and made some slow passive movements with flank pawns.  This meant that in the early middlegame they had a space disadvantage, and a massive disadvantage in development - on move 9 the evaluation was better than [+4] for me.

With the centre locked, I infiltrated Black's position with my bishops and gradually suffocated all the movement around Black's king!  On move 19, Black made a game-changing blunder [+8] though it wasn't obviously so during the game (19... Kxe7).  By moving the king into the dark-square diagonal and a potential check, Black lost a critical defensive tactic.  Prior to this point, my bishop on c6 was pinned against my queen by their rook.  Now, I could unpin the bishop by giving a check with my queen!

This proved decisive as it effectively added one further attacking piece and the suffocation of the king could now suddenly be released with a forced series of trades!  And at the verge of the final trade, Black resigned as they would have entered an endgame with only 5 pawns, against 6 pawns and a rook.

Good game!

Game on chess.com: https://www.chess.com/game/live/64627381377