Can I decline the Vienna Gambit with my bishop (Bd6)?
#ViennaGame #ViennaGambit
One of the amazing things about chess is how quickly you can encounter something that is novel to you, even in an opening you have a great degree of familiarity. Recently, I played a game where I was able to open with the standard (Falkbeer) Vienna Gambit (e4 e5 Nc3 Nf6 f4) where my opponent surprised me. They declined the gambit by defending their pawn on e5 with Bd6. According to the Lichess community database of lower-rated blitz and rapid games, the Vienna Gambit is declined by Bd6 only 1% of the time.
My knowledge of the Vienna Gambit was such that I immediately knew that this was objectively bad, and yet at the same time, I didn’t know how to immediately punish it! In the actual game, I used the heuristic that “if you can take the full centre with pawns, you should do so” and I played d4, putting three pawns in the centre. This is a mistake – a blunder in fact according to Stockfish.
On post-game analysis with the chess.com Stockfish engine, the way to approach this is in the same way as the much more common decline of the Vienna Gambit with Nc6. That is, the line starts with immediately capturing the opponent’s e-pawn with the f-pawn (4. fxe4). The only logical move is for the Black bishop to capture back (4… Bxe5), they defended the pawn with bishop for this purpose after all. However, this then allows for the forward advance by the d-pawn, to which Black must retreat their bishop (5. d4 Bd6). Then, the e-pawn marches forward again (6. e5) which forks Black’s bishop and knight, and it is unavoidable that one of them will be lost. At the end of this sequence, the evaluation favours White at over +4, White is up in material by a full piece, and has more development. White has a win advantage over Black at 80% vs 18% at this point.
In essence, against a prepared Vienna Gambit player, declining the gambit with Bd6 is losing on move 3!
In the actual game, the trickiness of the Vienna Gambit saved me from my error, and I got a dominant position out of the opening. Simply, someone who declines the Vienna Gambit with Bd6 is not likely to play very accurately afterwards even if you do stuff up. In the middle game, I managed to get a massive attack on the opponent’s king, and even scored a brilliancy according to the engine on move 16! I squander that immediately, but the advantage of my better structure allowed me to force an endgame where I had two rooks to my opponent’s one.
Game on chess.com: https://www.chess.com/game/live/52024820237
