EXPECT YOUR OPPONENT TO MAKE THE BEST MOVE?

A dissatisfied Marine lieutenant colonel has contributed to the field of "quit-lit" with a video challenging his superiors, and National Command Authority.

I'll let others engage the political message, or call to rebellion. Rather, it's the chess position on his board that intrigues me.  The most logical way it arose was with 1 d4 Nf6 2 Bg5 d5.

The other sequence, 1 d4 d5 2 Bg5 doesn't make much sense, with that Bishop aiming at a well-defended king pawn; although there's some analysis.  The moves as I guessed are something called the Trompowsky Attack, and it's a little chess gamesmanship in which the best way to take a queen-pawn opening off the rails is with 1 ... Nf6, and deviating with 2 Bg5 rather than going into one of the Indian defenses or transposing into the Queens Gambit Declined might be a good way to take the second player out of book.

The 2 ... d5 response is daring the first player to play Bxf6, which is the move the colonel subsequently posted.  The best recapture is with the e-pawn, now both Bishops are able to develop, which is often hard to do in a Queen's Pawn opening.  A chess player might have to ask why his opponent is conceding the doubled pawns.

RUNNING EXTRA.  The colonel is getting hammered in some sectors of the internet.  His chess strategy, well, maybe it's not that unconventional.

The ‘Trompowsky Attack’ is a fairly common opening that describes the choice to move the white bishop to the g5 square, which threatens the black knight on the f6 square. This is an aggressive response to the ‘Indian defense,’ which describes black’s choice to move the knight forward. The Indian defense is itself a response to white’s choice to create a ‘Queen’s Pawn’ game with an opening move of d4. ‘Bxf6’ means “Bishop takes Knight on f6,” with f6 referring to the square on the 6th rank and 6th file of the chessboard.

Recently, grandmasters of chess that have played in games with the ‘Trompowsky Attack’ opening include Azerbaijani’s Mamedyarov, Russia’s Kramnik, China’s Liren, and America’s Philippine-born So. There are approximately 2,100 professional games on record that included this exact position, with white winning 27%, black winning 32%, and the rest resulting in a draw, though the powerful open-source chess analysis engine ‘Stockfish‘ determines this position to provide equal opportunity for a victory by each side.

It's useful to have a few offbeat openings, with analysis, to keep opponents guessing, and the Trompowsky probably works well at discombobulating players you suspect spend a lot of time memorizing openings, and an intuitive player can achieve a lot that way.  Even though those 2100 games are a small sample by chess standards (there are probably that many King's Indians in a month) the fact that the second player wins around a third of the time suggests that conceding the minor exchange might be unsound for the first player.