von Hennig-Schara Gambit with 9.Qb3

The von Hennig-Schara Gambit or Schara Gambit is one of my frequently played openings against the Queen's Gambit. I learned  this sharp opening line from watching three 30-min videos of GM Boris Alterman in his weekly presentation in ICC called the Gambit Guide. GM Alterman had probably covered almost every gambit in chess openings that one could possibly imagine and I like his presentations. I usually watch his videos several times because many of the moves have to be memorized. Watching his videos over and over helps me improve my tactics.

In my game below, my opponent opened with the QGD. We followed the move orders in the von Hennig-Schara Gambit until the eighth move. On move 9, my opponent decided to retreat his queen to b3 instead of the usual 9.Qd1 (see diagram below). There have been games in the past that proved 9.Qb3 is dangerous because of its intention, which is to take b7, and the risk of getting trapped due to the limited space the queen can maneuvre. According to FM Eric Schiller’s article shown on this link, http://www.ericschiller.com/pdf/ScharaGambit.pdf, the b7 pawn in this opening is heavily poisoned. Schiller's cited one of Anatoly Karpov's games which has now become an important game in opening theories. Karpov played 9...Bc5 which is now a standard move in this opening line.

GM Gserper’s article, Openings for Tactical Players: Von Hennig-Schara Gambit, says that this is one of the chess openings that have unsolved mysteries and questions that will probably never be answered. I have at least two OTB games in the past where this opening also worked like magic. One of which I played against a world champion GM, losing  after being up by a piece due to a terrible blunder. In an ongoing tournament created by RUBENGAR46100 called SPEEDMATCH II, I won a game in this gambit against CarvinSharp, one of the best players participating which I would like to share in this blog.

I am having good results in this tournament playing very aggressively with gambits - gambiting not just pawns but more frequently my pieces. I find most interesting are the two games where I played the Traxler Counter-Attack, winning in both.

My game in the Schara Gambit is shown below: