What is the Tennison Gambit? (beginners)
The Tennision Gambit is a chess opening played by white and requires the sacrifice of a knight and bishop in order to obtain black's queen. In order to use this gambit, you need to play as white and black will need to use the Scandinavian defense.
From here instead of the expected exchange of pawns, white will move his knight to f3.
From black's perspective, taking the pawn on e4 seems like a good idea. Not only will he win a pawn, but he will be threatening to capture your f3 knight as well. Naturally, black takes the pawn. Black does not realize that this is exactly what we want here, and this will ultimately lead to the loss of his queen. After black goes for the capture, we move our knight to g5, threatening black's pawn.
This is the deciding move for black. If black decides to save his pawn, we will continue with the gambit. If not, we will recapture and move on. If black does decide to save his pawn, he has a number of options.
The first option we will look at is bishop to f5.
This does not seem like a good move because black's bishop would be in a very bad position here. The bishop is cramped by the pawn it is defending and would only be controlling two spaces. Additionally, we could always bring out our other knight to c3 and black would be faced with the same problem as before.
The next option for black is queen to d5.
Black is highly unlikely to do this, because it uses his queen early on in the game. The other problem to consider with this move is the fact that we could use our other knight to fork the queen and pawn, and black would be forced to retreat his queen, allowing us to take his pawn. This would be good for us because we would have both of our knights developed, and black would have all of his pieces where they started. So this is also not a likely move for black.
The next option for black is to bring out his pawn to f5.
This is also a bad move because it exposes black's king on the kingside, and it is already exposed on the queenside.
The final option for black is to bring out his knight to f6.
This is the most likely move for black. It defends the e4 pawn, while at the same time develops a knight. After black plays this move, we will offer up a trade of pawns by moving our queen's pawn up to d3. Black is likely to accept the exchange because he will lose the pawn anyways, his pawn is in a bad position, and he is already a pawn ahead. Although it seems like a good trade for black, if he plays this, his queen is dead. After black accepts the exchange, we will recapture with our bishop.
From here it is very tempting for black to get rid of the g5 knight by playing pawn to h6. However this is a HUGE mistake. We will capture the pawn on f7, forking the queen and rook. Black will be forced to take the knight.
After black takes the knight, we will check him with our bishop. Black is forced to capture with his king, and the queen is ours for the taking!
Here is the gambit all together:
As you can see, we are at a huge advantage here. We are prepared to castle, we are three points up, and black's king is exposed in the center of the board. It should be an easy game from here! =)
