How To Make Your Own Trap
It's finally here. The one you've all been waiting for. What this series of trap study has culminated in. What is derived from a key piece of advice from GMs.
The guide to making your own trap is now here.
Despite what the Engine says, all the traps that I have taught you so far are book moves, and many advanced players do know the counters. I once read an article that emphasizes that you should create your own opening theory.
And today, I will show you how to do just that.
If you are viewing my blog for the first time, I welcome you all. If you are recurring followers, I thank all of you for your patience as I worked to compile this post. I don’t want to keep you waiting any further, so let’s jump right in.
Now, creating a trap is very time consuming. It took me a couple days to experiment with all the variations, and I often lost more than I won in actual games (my status during the time of working on this was "Experimenting = Rating Crash"). I assure you, it will be worth it.
So here are the main rules of creating a trap:
1. Queen sacrifices are a very useful bait
The Queen is an extremely powerful piece, so many players are eager to remove it as soon as possible. Use this to your advantage, hanging your Queen. Threaten a square, and then hang your Queen as bait so that this threat is ignored. That is how the Legal Trap and the Halosar Trap work.
2. Bring your Queen out early
Following up to step 1, a good way to sacrifice your Queen is to put it in a position to be captured. But not before wreaking some havoc first. The Queen is extremely powerful, and can play multiple threats, which is why it is helpful to use it. If you have played the Nelson bot, you are often unsure of what to do in the face of his early Queen threats. Such confusion can give you the advantage off the bat, even if you make a trap that doesn’t sacrifice the Queen.
3. Knights are key
The Knight is a key piece to develop if you want to attack. Its ability to jump over pieces means that you don’t have to move or capture pieces to advance it, and it’s L-shape enables you to fork the King and Queen without either piece taking it, which is impossible in other King-Queen forks, which therefore require more preparation. Knights are also good for smothered mate, so a Queen and Knight attack can give you a clear advantage.
4. Look for forks
The most common opening moves involve forks, and for good reason. They develop your pieces, and take away key ones from your opponent. If you do experiment, I advise you to think “how can I fork them?” If you make a plan to fork, and extend that plan to the first move, you have basically created a trap.
5. Keep an eye on f7 if you’re White, or f2 if you’re Black
The Scholar’s Mate is possible when the Queen and Bishop both threaten f7. The Legal Trap is possible when the Knight and Bishop both threaten f7. F7 is a weak square that can easily come under attack from multiple places, so it is a good place to build an attack.
6. Look at current standard games and traps and think “how can I move differently”
You might look at the board, and get stuck. That is when it is helpful to consult strategies that are already in existence. You have no doubt analyzed games and thought “what should I have done?” if you wanted to improve. That method does enable you to plan differently.
For the opening, you can either use a conventional or unconventional opening. If you choose unconventional, the odds of a player knowing how to defend are lower, but if you choose conventional, the trap is that much more surprising and unexpected. I personally prefer conventional.
I would now like to show you all a trap for Black I invented, which I call the King’s Knight Gambit, as an example:
As you might determine, I played this one by largely following step 6, as I analyzed the Blackburne-Schilling Gambit and decided to make a different move.
I would appreciate some feedback on this trap, so that I can improve my own trap creation, and maybe offer the rest of you better advice.
Hope this guide works for you all
— ChessPawn921
