EVIL FUN with the Englund Gambit!
#QueensPawnOpening #EnglundGambit
The Englund Gambit is my favourite response to the Queen's Pawn Opening (1. d4 e5). The immediate provocation in the centre of the board on move 1 is the chess equivalent of, "come at me bro!". And often, the games go down a fun, aggressive, and tactical line rather than the more positional games that the (1. d4) player might be aiming for.
In this game, we entered the Main Line and on move 4, I got to play the "Killer Queen" (https://www.chess.com/blog/vitualis/black-killer-queen-of-the-englund-gambit) to b4 with check, threatening the pawn on b2 and the bishop on f4. White plays natural looking moves and yet, four moves after that on move 8, I'm up 5 points of material, White's queen side has been shredded, and Stockfish 15 NNUE at greater than depth 30 gives a crushing evaluation of [-9]!
One of the interesting things with the Englund Gambit positions for Black is that Stockfish seems to get a little confused with evaluating the positions at lower depths. Deeper analysis also seems to find that the position is worse for White than first appears, and curiously chess.com's implementation of Stockfish rated one of my moves (14... dxe5) as a brilliancy, where I couldn't see why that was the case, and external higher depth Stockfish identifies other moves that are better.
On move 21 after a series of trades, we enter a very interesting and unbalanced endgame. I had the rook pair while White had three minor pieces (two knights and a bishop). However, I had a major pawn majority - 7 pawns - while White only had 4 where a couple of these pawns were isolated. My opponent was a great sport and played on, but they were never able to regain an advantage. After I forced a trade of one rook for two of their minor pieces, they resigned as it was impossible for White to prevent promotion of my a-pawn. GG!
Game on chess.com: https://www.chess.com/game/live/62042389887
