Talk:Hippopotamus Defence

Old talk
Hippopotamus defence has been on the votes for deletion page. Decision was to keep. The debate archived on Votes for deletion/Hippopotamus Defence. Sjakkalle 08:47, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Hi, if you google hippo with chess you will see that the name Hippopotamus also describes a different opening system for black, viz b6, d6, e6, g6, Bb7, Bg7, Ne7, Nd7. IM Andrew Martin has published a book and articles on this, I believe. So I think there should be a separate page for that Hippo too. Tommy-Chivs 15:35, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Tommy-Chivs is right. Actually, that opening, although offbeat, is considerably more respectable than the article the text describes. Spassky played that opening twice in one of his world championship matches against Petrosian, drawing both times (although as I recall Petrosian came within a hair's-breadth of annihilating Spassky, blundering at the key moment, in the second of those games). One of the games is here. Reviews of IM Martin's 2005 book The Hippopotamus Rises: The Re-Emergence of a Chess Opening are here and here. Krakatoa 20:45, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

The other "Hippo"
The page currently mentions that the name Hippopotamus Defence has also been used to describe 1. e4 Nh6 2. d4 g6 3. c4 f6. This is not quite true. As this page reveals, the name Hippopotamus has also been used to describe an opening system involving the moves f3, g3, Nh3, Nf2 for White or f6, g6, Nh6, Nf7 for Black. The difference between an opening and a system is that the moves of a system can be played in any order (except for the obvious constraints of legality, e.g. Nf2 cannot be played before the pawn has vacated that square). Thus describing it as an offshoot of the Adams Defence (1. e4 Nh6) is not really correct. I am going to amend this.

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Origin of the name 'Hippopotamus'
Following an extensive rewrite of this article (which had previously been little more than a set of quotations from various books on the opening, without any detail on the opening theory), one point struck me...

One element of the previous article which I retained is a section stating (without quoting a source) that the name 'Hippopotamus' was coined by commentators of the 1966 Petrosian-Spassky world championship match.

I note, however, that Andrew Martin states in 'The Hippopotamus Rises' (page 6) that the name Hippopotamus was coined by the rather obscure English player JC Thompson, who called his 1957 book 'The Hippopotamus Chess Opening'. Thompson's Hippo does seem to be a rather different creature, however, which is why I removed all reference to it from the revised article (Martin refers to it as just 'piddling around on the third rank' and states that Thompson's ideas 'would have little value today'). Martin only gives examples which differ dramatically from the version played by, for example, Spassky in 1966 and it doesn't really seem clear that Thompson's Hippo bears any relationship to the Hippo as it is currently understood.

However, I wonder about the origin of the name. For example, are any editors aware of whether the 1966 commentators who are said to have coined the term Hippopotamus were English speakers (possibly aware of Thompson's 1957 book?) or, say, eastern Europeans (probably unaware of Thompson's book?). And do we even have a source for the idea that the name was coined in 1966?

I had always assumed that the Hippo was named after the similarity to the pawn profile of the double fianchetto structure to the look of a hippo almost entirely submerged under the surface of a river. However, that derivation cannot come from Thompson because his Hippopotamus didn't look like that.

Any thoughts? Axad12 (talk) 20:10, 8 October 2023 (UTC)


 * See this thread on the English Chess Forum – Baruch Harold Wood apparently connected Spassky's setup to Thompson's. Cobblet (talk) 22:41, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks Cobblet, that's interesting.
 * The forum post quotes BH Wood as observing that games 12 and 16 of the 1966 Petrosian-Spassky World Championship match reached positions that were pure Thompson, and then as saying 'What a shame he didn't live to see his system successfully adopted in a World Championship match'.
 * However, having seen some examples of Thompson's play in Martin's book 'The Hippopotamus Rises' I don't really see the similarity.
 * E.g. In Ragozin-Thompson (simul, London 1956), Thompson opened with a formation as follows: g6, f6, Nh6-f7, e6, d6, c6, Be7, Nd7-f8, Bd7 (i.e. lots of pawns on the 3rd rank, knight developed eccentrically to f7, and no fianchettoed bishops).
 * Similarly, Janosevic-Thompson (simul, London 1956), where Thompson started: f6, Nh6-f7, e6, d6, c6, e5, g6, Bg7 (one fianchettoed bishop, both long diagonals blocked with pawns, knight to f7 and lots of pawns on the 3rd rank).
 * I can't help but think that Wood's comment may have been intended firmly with tongue in cheek and that Thompson's 'system' was considered to be essentially 'piddling around on the third rank' (to quote Martin), rather than the Hippopotamus formation as it is recognised today (i.e. g6/Bg7/b6/Bb7/d6/e6/Nd7/Ne7/a6/h6 in whatever order).
 * If Martin had been able to locate a Thompson game involving, say, a double fianchetto structure, then I cant help but think he would have used it in his book to illustrate some degree of similarity.
 * It looks to me as though Wood's comment wasn't intended to mean that Spassky was playing Thompson's opening, but rather that he was playing strategically a la Thompson in the sense of Black setting up a flexible pawn structure that can react to any White advance into his half of the board.
 * On the other hand, we do know for a fact that Spassky played a game vs Ujtelky in 1964 where Ujtelky played the full Hippopotamus formation (as he did on many occasions) and it's reasonable to assume that Spassky derived it from him. In the absence of any info to the contrary I think one has to doubt whether a Slovakian like Ujtelky could possibly have been aware of the games of a minor English county player like Thompson - but there doesn't seem to be any real similarity between the two players' systems in any case.
 * Any thoughts? Axad12 (talk) 02:23, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I haven't seen anything to suggest that Spassky or Ujtelky would've been aware of Thompson, and I agree it's unlikely. As you point out, Thompson put the king's knight on f7, while Ujtelky put it on e7. Nevertheless, it seems that Wood may well have been one of the first people to dub Ujtelky's formation a Hippopotamus, because of the strategic similarity. If we can find out more, this is worth explaining in the article, but unfortunately I don't have access to 1960s British chess magazines, nor to Keene and Botterill's book on the Modern which I suspect would also have some relevant information.
 * The Oxford Companion to Chess notes that there are 19th-century references to Alapin's Opening as the Hippopotamus Game. Edward Winter also notes that there's apparently a discussion about the origin of the term "Hippopotamus Opening" in the 1950s by Michael Macdonald-Ross in issue 14 of the Myers Openings Bulletin, which I don't have access to. Cobblet (talk) 18:12, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes. To be completely honest, those were some of the unclear issues that I was trying to gloss over in the first sentence of the History section when I wrote 'The first master strength player to experiment with Hippopotamus type structures was [...] Ujtelky' (which is at least definitely true).
 * The overall issue re: Thompson is, I think, murky and reliant on obscure sources. It is probably more a subject for Edward Winter style investigation than for detailed coverage in the Wikipedia article. Axad12 (talk) 18:40, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Just a brief note following on from the discussion above...
 * Earlier today I managed to look through a copy of Keene & Botterill's book on the Modern Defence in a second-hand shop. On pages 142-3 it notes that Flohr's (German language) book on the 1966 World Championship referred to the opening not as 'the Hippopotamus' but as 'the Frog', due to the similarity in appearance to a frog's eyes emerging from a pond.
 * This would seem to suggest that the term 'Hippopotamus' is of English coinage, for Flohr (as a Czechoslovakian) would surely have been aware if the term had been in use in Russia in the 50s or 60s.
 * Whether Flohr took his term 'the Frog' from a similar usage in Russian or Slovak, or if he invented it himself, isn't clear from Keene & Botterill.
 * Flohr was presumably very familiar with the Hippopotamus games of the Slovak master Ujtelky. My best guess would be that Ujtelky's system was probably known as the Frog behind the Iron Curtain at that time. Axad12 (talk) 21:13, 31 May 2024 (UTC)