Other top grandmasters who have played the King's Gambit as White in international competition since 1960 include Spassky, Bronstein, Larsen, Korchnoi, Timman, Short, Judith and Sofia Polgar, Ilya Gurevich, Lein, Gheorghiu, Soltis, Rohde, Hebden, Westerinen, and Ziatdinov to name a few.

These games are mindnumbing to analyze, and calculation of these positions can make a mere mortal's head spin while the clock is ticking.

I have toyed with the opening in correpondence games but I think I'd sweat bullets trying to play this in any sort of OTB game.

But what a rush it is to watch a GM push that f-pawn forward instead of 2. Nf3. If I'm watching the game live I usually just turn off the analysis in my head and watch the game unfold like a dramatic plot on the board.

I think I have a new favorite post. Thanks Batgirl, that was an amazing read.

Ah, yet another discussion of the ol' KG -  with the usual unsupported claims of refutation and the usual posting of uncommented games people could look up on their own...

 Why the KG is not more frequent on the super GM level is not hard to explain. Chess is *work* for most professional players, and openings are tools to help you on the way to a win or a draw. And since a draw is the normal result on that level, the white pieces and a main mainline allows you to play for only two results not worrying too much if the game is undecided. While many players below 2700+ (often waay below) see a draw as half a loss, especially if it's completely uneventful...

"A win by Johansson in the 2001 Nordic Championship (ironically,  not playing the Bishop's Gambit)"

Btw, there's no irony - as I didn't start writing the book until the autumn of 2003. But it's of course ironic that an expert in chess history would make such a careless mistake. But, I suppose the good news is that I'm not history!

Thomas, you should know I'm not an expert at anything, let alone chess history. The irony was in the fact that while I had just suggested that you seem to prefer the Bishop's Gambit, I chose to display a game following a different line.  At least I didn't say you were playing it ironically. The uncommented games were nothing more than examples of the King's Gambit being played at various levels after Fisher's so-called refutation, to indicate that while the particular line Fischer chose to analyze may (or may not) be refuted, the Gambit itself is sound, or as sound as a gambit can be.  No comments were necessary and I'd leave that to the experts anyway.