What if there were no King’s Gambit?

At Mike Splane’s latest chess party, on Sunday, I saw Richard Koepcke lugging around a ginormous chess book that was about the size of a phone book, and I asked him what it was. To my surprise, it was a new book on the King’s Gambit! I refer to John Shaw’s The King’s Gambit, published this month by Quality Chess.

Anyone familiar with me knows that I am not a theory hound and I am not the sort of person who races out to buy the latest opening book. Quite the opposite. But where the King’s Gambit is concerned, I’m willing to make an exception. This is my main weapon against 1. e4 e5, and naturally I want to keep abreast of everything new. And fortunately we have had some spectacular books on the King’s Gambit in recent years, truly immense labors of love that have brought the theory into the twenty-first century. First Thomas Johansson’s book The Fascinating King’s Gambit (2004) and now Shaw’s.

What can make an opening book worthwhile in the era of chess computers and databases? In a word, viewpoint. (Well, in Russian that’s two words, tochka zreniya.) What you want from an opening book is a clear authorial voice that steers you through the maze of variations and says, here is what is worth paying attention to, here are the main ideas, etc. Johansson has that in abundance, and from my quick five-minute skim, Shaw does too.

It’s really way premature for me to review Shaw’s book because I have literally seen it for only those five minutes. But I can tell you the most interesting thing for me. I immediately looked up the chapter on the Bishop’s Gambit, 1. e4 e5 2. f4 ef 3. Bc4, and I was stunned to find a short chapter (compared to the rest of the book) called “The Refutation of the Bishop’s Gambit.”

How ironic! Johansson’s King’s Gambit book is a paean to the Bishop’s Gambit. He is a reformed King’s Knight’s Gambit (1. e4 e5 2. f4 ef 3. Nf3) player, who became disenchanted with that line because he couldn’t get enough compensation for the pawn in the old-fashioned … g5 variations. In the computer age, Black can grab the pawn and hold on. Now along comes Shaw with the opposite point of view: 3. Bc4 is busted and 3. Nf3 is in again.

To cut to the chase, Shaw’s claim is that after 1. e4 e5 2. f4 ef 3. Bc4 Nc6! White is at best fighting for equality. Obviously a careful evaluation of this claim will require me to buy the book and think long and hard about it, but here are some off-the-cuff thoughts.

First, I do have some prior experience against it, enough to be very wary. Back in the 2000-2005 era, when the Santa Cruz chess club was still alive, I played a lot of King’s Gambits, and Ilan Benjamin (who now seems regrettably out of the chess scene) went through a phase of playing 3. … Nc6. The main point is to invite 4. d4 Nf6 5. e5 d5! My first instinct was to play 6. Be2, but the game just went to a boring and lifeless equality. Then I looked it up in what books I had then (not even Johansson yet) and saw that 6. Bb3 was supposed to be the main line. The fun was back! After 6. Bb3 Ne4 7. Bxf4 Qh4+ 8. g3 Nxg3 9. Bxg3 Qe4+ 10. Kf2 Qxh1 (the old zigzag trick) White gets to sacrifice the exchange. In my opinion, exchange sacrifices are the life’s blood of the King’s Gambit. I looked at this line a lot (going out as far as move 30 sometimes!) and concluded it was fine for White.

But then, somewhere along the line, I put it on Fritz, and Fritz threw cold water on everything. Instead of 6. … Ne4, 6. … Bg4! throws a monkey wrench into White’s plans. After 7. Qd3 Nh5, the threat … Qh4+ is still in the air, Black’s pieces are well-developed, White’s are stepping on each other’s toes, and Black still has his extra pawn.

The funny thing is that Ilan never figured this out. I’m sure he didn’t use a chess program. Just about the time Fritz showed me how good 6. … Bg4 is, Ilan quite playing the 3. … Nc6 line and so I never had to worry about it again.

Now, apparently, I do. Of course, after seeing that Shaw considers it a “refutation,” I had to see what Johansson said. And his chapter on this is sketchy at best. He definitely considers 5. e5 to be no longer acceptable, and so he looks at two other ideas. He says that 5. Bd5 is “intriguing and fun to analyze. White might not have 100% compensation for the pawn, but it’s probably close enough for a decent surprise weapon.” Oh-oh. From a King’s Gambit partisan, this sounds like rather faint praise. The main line, he thinks, is 5. Nc3, and here he is a little happier about White’s chances. It’s still not hunky-dory, though, as he says things like this: “White’s pawn structure may not be the healthiest, but on the other hand White still has more influence in the center and a half-open g-file.” The big problem, though, is that there are no examples from master play. It’s all analysis.

Nine years later, Shaw has presumably gone over Johansson’s analysis with a fine-toothed comb and found problems. I think that line with the messed-up pawns was an important one. I still don’t know if there are any examples from practical play — for that I’d have to buy the book.

But let’s suppose he’s right. Suppose that 1. e4 e5 2. f4 ef 3. Bc4 Nc6 4. d4 Nf6 5. Nc3 Bb4 6. Ne2 is just good for Black. What then?

Well, first of all, here’s a puzzling point. White can also play 4. Nf3, offering a transposition back to the King’s Knight’s Gambit. Johansson is not keen on that because he has given up on the King’s Knight’s Gambit. But Shaw’s book, on the other hand, seems to be much more positive about it. So what does Shaw have to say about this simple transposition? I’m not sure! I handed the book back to Richard before I thought of that question.

But let’s look at a worst-case scenario. Suppose that even transposing to the King’s Knight’s Gambit is no good. Suppose I can’t play the King’s Gambit any more. What am I to do?

Actually it’s not a bad question to ask, because I ought to have a lower-risk backup plan anyway. Currently, my backup plan is simply to play 1. d4 in case I don’t feel like having a life-or-death battle starting on move two. I’m moving more and more toward d-pawn openings anyway, because I seem to have better results with them.

But staying in the e-pawn spectrum, I think that one thing I would want to do is check out Tiger Lilov’s current series of lectures at ChessLecture.com on a “Four Knights Repertoire.” The Four Knights Opening (1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Nc3 Nf6) is traditionally seen as boring, but it can’t be any more boring than the current fad of playing the Ruy Lopez with d3 for White, which seems to me like trying to kill your opponent with a marshmallow. The other thing I’d look at, if I were forced to give up the King’s Gambit but still wanted something sharp, would be the Evans Gambit. (1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Bc5 4. b4.)

P.S.: As I mentioned before, I am about to go to Germany to attend the Heidelberg Laureate Forum. Most of the readers who responded to my post seemed okay with the idea of having some math posts here. You can always just choose not to read them. So for about the next week and half or so, this blog will turn into “dana blogs math”. If you’re not interested in math, come back in two weeks!