Buses and Morras come in threes

At least in Britain, the saying goes that you wait for a long time for a bus, and then three come along at once. That could be the first sentence about a blog about the maths of queues (and I could reminisce that in my Engineering degree at Cambridge, I did a thesis on the maths of cashpoint machines, ATMs, which were became commonplace in the UK from the mid70s); but no, this blog is instead about the fact that yesterday I had three virtually identical games in the Morra gambit.

I have been playing the Morra against the Sicilian in ICC blitz for the last several months, since buying Marc Esserman's quirky but fun book, Mayhem in the Morra! Nigel Short and I played the Morra in the 1970s; probably a good line for training teenagers in tactics; but also probably not much of an opening.

One of the least common defences to the Morra is what Marc calls the Siberian- it is partly a trappy line, with the standard Morra set up of Qe2 easily falling foul of a Ng4-Nd4 cheapo. However, yesterday I had three near identical short victories:

In the position above, Black's position is awkward or bad. Having not reached the above position before, how strange it is that it occurred three times yesterday.

Now, I wonder how long I shall have to wait until it turns up again?

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