Hi everyone.

I have only recently started playing chess, and whilst I'm enjoying experimenting with all the various White openings until I find a couple that fit my playstyle/personality, I have really settled on the Scandanavian Defence when playing as Black.

However, the obvious downside is that not everyone plays e4 openings, and so I was just wondering if there are any Black responses to a d4 opening (which is quite common here) that are the equivilent or similar in style to the Scandanavian defence?

The main reasons I enjoy the Scandanavian defence are: 

1. It has been really simple to learn (but fun to try and master). I have only be playing a few months and I feel really comfortable with the various lines available.

2. I love that it is so aggressive and essentially steals the initiative from White and immediately forces a response capture or response defence and can really throw people off their early natural developement orders. I feel like after as little as one or two moves that I am in control of the flow of the game.

3. I have been having a great time experimenting with the icelandic variation (hope thats the name) whereby you can attack a capture of d5 with Nf6 and avoid moving the Queen entirely and thus reduce the harm of breaking some of the early principles beginners like me learn (basically don't let your Queen get chased around the board!).

So are there any other defences that are similar in style or principle to the Scandanavian Defence when responding to White d4?

Thanks.

Well, I dont play the Scandinavian with black.

But if you points 1 and 2 are important to you, maybe you should check out the Budapest, I think it qualifies on both.

Thank you very much this is exactly what I was looking for. I looked up some of the main lines of this Gambit and had a go using it in a computer chess game and this suits my playstyle as Black perfectly.

When playing Black I like to immediately force White to respond to what I'm doing, rather than let them smoothly develop whatever opening they have planned and then trying to counter that.

Even better, it doesn't seem to be overly popular which is always a plus for me.

Thanks again.

Cool. There is a group with plenty of vote chess games, If you join you can get insights from some pretty strong players. Vote chess is an excellent learning tool

http://www.chess.com/groups/home/budapest-gambiteers

The budapest is a somewhat poor choice. There are a number of ways white can get a big positional advantage. The only similarity it has with the scandinavian is that they both involve early pawn breaks against the center and the queen comes out reasonably early. 

If you play the scandinavian with Qa5 and c6 you are setting up a caro-slav structure. Not surprisingly, you'll see this same structure in the Slav and Semi-Slav.