In my first contribution to Damkunst I had already outlined how the very earliest years of my draughts career had roughly unfolded. Although that noun really ought to be placed between quotation marks, because at that age you usually have no idea yet that you are building something like a “career”. After all, around that same time I also ‘played’ football (Ajax!), took guitar lessons (Frans van Norden!), sang in several choirs (including the boys’ choir that performed at the annual St Matthew Passion performances), and was involved in scouting; and as is well known, I did not become a footballer, guitarist, singer or Scout. For all it mattered, that ‘draughts business’ of mine could just as easily have fizzled out. But no - it didn’t.
In brief: around the age of nine (or ten), I had, thanks to my parents, been introduced to the game of draughts; shortly after my eleventh birthday, I had become a member of the youth section of the Christian Draughts Club Amsterdam; about three months later (14 April 1961) I played my first “official” game at a CDA club evening - that is, with clock and mandatory notation; and in March 1963, on the advice of my mentor R. C. Keller, I switched my membership from CDA to Gezellig Samenzijn. Besides competing in internal and external team competitions, I had also taken part in two individual tournaments. One of these, the Amsterdam Youth Championship 1962, proved a great success: I won the tournament with a score of 19 out of 10, well ahead of players such as Ruud Palmer, Henk Werner, and Albert Pater.
But the subsequent North Holland Youth Championship 1963 turned out to be a huge disappointment. Although I won four of the seven games, my losses to Govert Westerveld, Ruud Palmer, and Kees Pippel meant that I didn’t even come close to a ranking that would have qualified me for the national final. In this context, I would like to refer to page 441 (and following) of Mijn Hollands Universum (Muiden 2023), where, in the introduction to game 10, I reflect, among other things, on my rather harsh first encounter with Kees Pippel.
Just under three months after the North Holland Youth Championship, which had turned out so disastrously for me, a new test presented itself. The GS, founded on 6 May 1907, which had organized a strong international tournament in May 1957 to mark its 50th anniversary (see also page 11 of Mijn eerste scalp), had - for whatever reason - let the 11th lustrum (May 1962) pass by. Perhaps to make up for this ‘oversight’, a Youth Tournament was held around Pentecost 1963. The eight-player field included four members of the organizing club (in addition to myself, Herman van Westerloo, Dick Roelofs, and Dick Klooster), supplemented by four ‘national’ players, namely Anton Schotanus (Leeuwarden), Fred Ivens (The Hague), Jan Groeneveld (Zwolle), and Adrie Bos from Zeist.
For me, this was the first “real” tournament of my career. Perhaps people usually don’t give it much thought. But for my sense, there is a fundamental difference between, on the one hand, a “tournament” whose rounds are played only on weekends - or, worse, just once a week (such as internal competitions, city or provincial championships, or - especially - the semifinals of the national title tournament) and, on the other hand, a tournament that takes place over several consecutive days.
Admittedly, the first type can have its charms for those who have successfully made it through the weekend. And of course especially for those who experienced the first two weekends as one great triumph! I know what I am talking about. For in the 1971 Dutch Championship, I not only won my first two games (on the weekend of 20 and 21 March I defeated - despite my visit to the “Spring Party” organized by Jan and Joke Wielaard, described on page 759 of MHU-2 - both Sjoerd Visser and Frank Drost), but I also won the games of the following weekend against Geert van Dijk and Frans Hermelink!
At the time, I had well over a week to enjoy that 8 out of 4 score - and to relish my upcoming game against Evert Bronstring, my next opponent. I had decided to assault him with 1.35-30!? And so I did. And although the game turned out completely different from what I had imagined based on a blitz game (Riga 1969), leaving me from the opening with a position that, strictly speaking, didn’t look promising, I could still boast a perfect score after the fifth round! But I have also experienced the opposite. Around (leap day!) 29 February 1964, I concluded my debut in the Amsterdam Championship with a first place shared with Lex den Doop.
(By sheer coincidence, I had also burst out of the starting blocks in that tournament with 10 out of 5. The only difference with 1971 was that after the sixth round I was still on 10 points: my first encounter with Wim Beeke, the older brother of Henk Beeke, I had not survived. See once again page 11 of Mijn eerste scalp.)
The very next day, on Sunday 1 March 1964, the play-off of - in principle - three games already began. I lost that first game. And then I had to exercise patience for a full week, until Sunday 8 March, before I would even get the chance to make up my deficit. I can still see myself after that loss to Den Doop, standing disconsolately at the tram stop of line 13 on the corner of the Rozengracht and the Marnixstraat, in the company - if only for a little while - of my clubmate and friend Arthur Schuss. He had been kind enough to walk with me all the way from the Van Nispenhuis via the Stadhouderskade and Nassaukade, before taking the tram to Central Station himself and - finally - the bus to Tuindorp Oostzaan. Schuss, whose name will not be unfamiliar to readers of MHU-1, must also have sensed that I was not facing a pleasant week ahead...
The GS Youth Tournament 1963 now belonged - fortunately! - to the second type. It began on Friday 31 May and ended on Monday 3 June. Except on the final day, two rounds were played daily, and I will conveniently assume that the time control - as was customary at the time - was fifty moves in two hours. I had won my first three games (against, in order, Klooster, Van Westerloo, and Roelofs) when I had to face Anton Schotanus in the afternoon - or, depending on how you look at it, evening - round on Saturday 1 June.
Anton Schotanus, born on 4 January 1943 in Leeuwarden, who was therefore already twenty at the time of the Youth Tournament and thus one of the oldest participants (only Herman van Westerloo [1941] was older), hardly needs an introduction for the reader. Many, both older and younger, will know him - for example, from his time as chairman of the Royal Dutch Draughts Federation (1989–1998). But above all, simply as a draughts player. Schotanus has now been active as a competitive player for more than 65 years: his oldest game - I am of course relying on the database - dates from February 1959(!), his most recent (competition) game: a nearly equal draw with former Dutch Championship finalist Steven Wijker, is only a week and a half(!!) old at the moment I put the finishing touches on this article…
In the intervening 66, almost 67 years, Schotanus took part in the Dutch Championship six times: in 1968, 1971–1972, 1975, and 1988–1989. He generally achieved results that could be admired, such as the fifty-percent scores in his first three Dutch Championship appearances or - especially - 12 points from 11 games in 1975.
Schotanus also gained fame as a correspondence draughts player, a discipline in which he became Dutch champion three times and even world champion once! The double-round(!) monster tournament with 19 participants in which that global coronation took place would not actually end until 1988, but had already begun five years earlier. I remember it well, because it was after our competition game of 10 September 1983 - in which Schotanus had handed me a painful tactical loss!; see (once again) part 1 of MHU - that he demonstrated to me the beautiful tactical win he had scored in his black game against Frits Luteijn.
Incidentally, I was by no means the only higher-rated player to have to admit defeat in his encounter(s) with Schotanus. Among others, Schotanus defeated Jannes van der Wal (Frisian Championship 1974) and Gantwarg (Turkstra Tournament 1968). And he won no fewer than four games against Harm Wiersma! (Naturally - as in the cases just mentioned - there were also a number of losses.) Schotanus beat Wiersma not only in his early years, as in 1965 (twice) and 1966, but also in 1970, when Wiersma was already widely regarded as one of the strongest players in the world!
As mentioned, the fourth-round encounter on the schedule was against Anton Schotanus. It would become a principled, interesting, and exceptionally rich duel in the semi-fork, a game that - of course - was not one hundred percent flawless but in which the number of serious mistakes was kept to a minimum. What may have been all the more surprising, because it was my very first semi-fork game in my career! In fact, as the computer-assisted analysis reveals, it took only one real mistake from Schotanus to turn an equal middlegame position (14x14) into a situation with twelve pieces for each side in which the balance was definitively broken.
Finally, this. Where concrete middlegame and endgame variations are concerned, this game commentary relies heavily on the analysis I wrote in the second decade of this century for earlier versions of my draughts autobiography: initially “Plan-F” (planned for 22 volumes of 25 games each…), later “Plan-K” (10 volumes, 30 games). As is known, all those mirages eventually had to give way to “Plan-P”, the project - perhaps not even much less megalomaniacal - that places the Dutch Opening and the most interesting of its many forms at the center. In any case - see Mijn Hollands Universum, of which volumes 1 (autumn 2023) and 2 (summer 2025) have now indeed come to light.
Now, the mere fact that we are dealing here with “old work” in my view in no way diminishes the (possible) significance of the present article; simply because that work has never before been made public! That was equally true for the analysis of the competition game Sijbrands–J.H. Beeke 1963, the duel that formed the subject of my previous contribution to Damkunst (“Mijn eerste scalp”). That, too, although written in an earlier decade, was nothing less than a “first publication”.
But with regard to Sijbrands–Schotanus 1963, I dare even say that we are dealing with a completely new commentary, even compared to the (unpublished) analyses from 2010 or 2014! And that has everything to do with the difference between then and now. At that time - let’s conveniently say some ten or fifteen years ago - I still believed I would have ample opportunity to set out my thoughts on the 1.34–30 opening. After all, my (white) games against Ramdeo Ramcharan and Kees Pippel (both 1970), Wim van der Kooij and Ndiaga Samb (both 1999), Gerrit de Bruijn (2007) and Cees Strooper (2009) were also part of Plan-K. So why would I already go into great detail in the very first game in which the 1.34–30 20–25 2.30–24 19x30 3.35x24 variation appeared on the board, discussing (for example) all the constructive alternatives available to Black instead of the 3…18–23 played by Schotanus? It was far more logical to do that only in those games where my opponents actually chose 3…18–22 (Ramcharan; Pippel; Strooper), 3…17–21 (Van der Kooij), or 3…16–21 (Samb). To ask the question was to answer it.
In 2025, 2026, on the other hand, there is little or no prospect that I, however much I would like to, will ever get around to writing a book entirely devoted to the 1.34–30 opening. Time and energy, after all, are not inexhaustible. And the MHU project, to which I invested heavily in the spring of 2018 (see my “Message to the Reader” in volume 1 for my reasons), naturally takes priority. Hence I have taken the opportunity to, as if it were a kind of draughts technical testament, share with the reader my insights and—undoubtedly highly subjective—preferences regarding both the 1.34–30 and the 1.35–30 openings, based on the present duel.