History in English Lesson: Having made some headway through the XXIst chapter of Gibbon‘s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in which the early church dispute over the relationship of the Son to the Father, the homoousion or “consubstantial” position of the the Orthodox party (which itself included a tendency towards Tritheism on the one hand and Sabellianism on the other), and the homoiousion or “of like substance” position of the Arian party, Dr M and I cleared away our books and got out the chess set.
Chess: We played two games of chess and the second game was by far the best we have played so far.
In the first game, I was White and Dr M was Black and I was pleased to see Dr M resorting to the Petrov Defence again, but it turned out that he had not fully digested the lessons of the last game in which the Petrov Defence was wheeled out, probably because it was me who blundered by failing to take advantage of his …Kt x P move. Dr M repeated the move in this game and this time I took proper advantage of it.
[table id=8 /]
In the second game Dr M was white and played his best game to date. For my part, I managed to avoid any big blunders and had to play carefully against Dr M’s development and wait for him to make a mistake. Here are the moves. I’ll add a few comments later:
[table id=9 /]
DH