Why opening traps ARE A LIE!!!!!

Hello and welcome back to my blog. Today I will be discussing a topic that has been going around a lot lately. Opening Traps. Now these may seem like a good opportunity to get quick checkmates, but DO NOT BE DECIEVED!!! Opening traps are A LIE and today i will show you why. Lets start by discussing various reasons why opening traps dont work, starting with:

When Your Opponent Knows How To Play Chess

You've probably seen this Englund gambit trap as black where if your opponent plays d4, you play e5, giving up a central pawn for absolutely zero reason.

The way this trap works is by targeting the pawn which just captured their pawn, hoping that white will defend. However, what happens if they just actually know how to play chess? The trap only works because of the bishop moving out, but what if the player knows that they already have a pawn, they shouldn't put their bishops out in front of their knights, and just develop both knights instead? Then black just gets a bad position that is over +0.5!

But what happens if they do develop their bishop? Well then let me show you what can go wrong next.

Your Opponent Plays Well Against Your Trap

This is the optimal Englund setup, and there is only one good move for white. You will not believe how many players I have played which actually played correctly. I usually test this in blitz games, against 600-700 rated players (my blitz rating is much lower than rapid/daily), and very few actually play the wrong move. In fact, when faced with problems like this such as in this Grob opening trap:

Now, i have had quite a few games where positions like this have happened, and guess which move was played more. That's right, Bishop c- oh. Knight c6? What? Yes, only a few players have played bishop to c6 in that position. Now compare these two positions closely. These look almost identical! So would your Englund-facing opponent really blunder? Or would they just get a better position? Now it is time for the probably least common reason, but still a very important one.

When You Forgor The Line (skull emoji)

This one is probably exclusive to only a few openings, The Traxler in The Fried Liver being one of them. In case you didn't know, The Traxler is a tricky line in a popular opening trap called the Fried Liver, which will be shown here:

If your opponent takes the bishop, it will end badly for them. If they do not, however, then you have to memorise a tricky series of moves. If your opponent plays The Traxler, you then have to memorise a series of tricky moves just to stay in the game, otherwise black will get a completely winning advantage and even checkmate in most cases! This is also another reason why opening traps are bad: There Are Good Counters To your Trap

Here is a game where I crushed someone in a daily game using The Traxler!

And now, it brings us to almost the end of this very long blog post. Hopefully by now you believe that opening traps rarely ever work and will just give you a bad position in most cases. Now next time you encounter a blog titled something similar to: "OPENING TRAPS (99.84% success rate), you know that it will be a waste of your time. But oh wait! What's this? A blog? About opening traps? WITH 600 VIEWS?!?!?!??! Welp, guess its time for one final, crushing reason to end opening traps once and for all:

NOBODY PLAYS THE OPENING THE TRAP IS IN

Let's say you have been studying Traxler theory as a 1000, ready and waiting to crush a poor unsuspecting noob who has no idea what they are doing. You go into a game as black and... they play d4. Well, you could always try again next game. Then you get white. And white. And black (they play the 3/4 knights). And white. And black. And white. And yet nobody you see has played the opening containing the exact trap you have studied. In fact, the blog in question contains traps in openings LITERALLY NOBODY PLAYS, like the Alekhine's Defense and The Bishop's opening (when u want to play the London but accidentally played e4 and not d4). So are opening traps really all that good? I'll leave that to you to decide.

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