Ruy López Opening | The Brilliant Jaenisch Gambit! 🤩

#ruylopez #jaenischgambit #brilliant #greekgift #bishopsac #rooksac

Recently, I’ve been playing a little bit less chess as I’ve not only been busy at work, but I’ve also been learning how to fish during my spare time. 🎣😅👍 

So, I found it interesting that in the last two rated games I played on chess.com, I not only had the black pieces, but managed to win both with the Jaenisch Gambit against the Ruy López Opening (1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 f5)! 🤩 Sometimes, things come in runs, and this is a good one!

Game 1: Ruy López Opening: Jaenisch Gambit, Declined 4. O-O
https://www.chess.com/game/live/116769568787

Both games were 15+10 rapid, but the first game is really more of a taster. Both of us blitzed out the moves, and this game is a demonstration of how the Jaenisch Gambit can take the unprepared Ruy López Opening off guard. My opponent has been a member of chess.com for almost 14 years (😲) and reviewing their games with the white pieces demonstrates that the Ruy López Opening is their preferred opening, having played it over 250 times, around 20% of their games. Reviewing their pattern on OpeningTree.com they almost always lead with e4 (I tip my hat to you sir!) and if they are allowed to, play the Ruy López. Needless to say, they are the expert on the Ruy López, compared to me!

However, of those 250 games, they’ve encountered the Jaenisch Gambit (3… f5) only seven times, less than 3% of games! This proportion is in keeping with the Lichess community database, and what is remarkable is that in that same database, the Jaenisch Gambit is categorically the most effective response by Black, in terms of win ratio. And it’s not even close!

In the Lichess analysis board tool, we can see the 12 most frequent responses by Black against the Ruy López Opening, data from over 120 million games! These twelve most frequent responses cover around 97% of these games and we can see that (3… f5) is the eight most frequent – it’s rare. Many chess players, including beginners, will know that that Ruy López Opening is excellent for White and the dataset confirms this! White has a win ratio advantage over Black at 51% vs 44% overall. This advantage is evident in all responses by Black, except for one! The Jaenisch Gambit is the combo breaker – the only response by Black where the win ratio is reversed. Of the 2.3 million games of the Jaenisch Gambit, Black wins 51% of the time compared to 45% by White!

In this game, White spent the first time thinking at the Jaenisch for 22 seconds, and then opted to decline the gambit with kingside castling. Unfortunately, this is immediately a mistake [+0.6 → -0.5] as White hang’s their e4-pawn, and after (4… fxe4), I win tempo against their f3-knight. Ouch!

White plays a sensible looking exchange (5. Bxc6 dxc6), which removes my defender of my e5-pawn, ostensibly allowing White to regain their material and move their knight out of the attack (6. Nxe5). However, White’s knight is now “offside” and aside from the castled king, White has no development. I don’t play the most accurate move the next turn with (6… Nf6?!), developing the knight [+0.1] rather than recognising an applicable tactic from the critical position in the Exchange Variation of the Jaenisch Gambit – that is, Qd4! White’s opportunity to hold onto the equality is to slam their d-pawn forward (7. d4), which supports their e5-knight by creating an outpost and opens the diagonal for their dark square bishop to develop. This isn’t necessarily the most obvious move, and instead, White plays the intuitive (7. Re1?) – taking control of the e-file, pressuring Black’s e4-pawn, and staring at Black’s king on e8 – which in the position is actually a mistake [-1.4].

In the position, I found a devious move (7… Qd5!?) which Stockfish doesn’t like [+0.7], but it isn’t manifestly bad even if White found the best response. My thoughts were that White didn’t find it the previous turn (d4) and so from a contingent probability perspective, they weren’t going to be sensitised to it. The queen appears to be threatening Black’s offside knight, and my intuition was that White will be looking for an escape square for their knight. However, it seems that all escape squares are defended (this isn’t true as (8. Nf3) gives the knight a single turn of respite as my e4-pawn will have a revealed pin to the king – not the easiest to see).

A curious phenomenon that can occur, and I’ve certainly experienced this myself, is that a momentary lapse in continuity can occur through wishful thinking. It’s where a solution suddenly seems to appear, but alas, it’s an illusion! My opponent calculated this position for 27 seconds (there are only 8 squares that the knight can jump to!) and then suddenly played (8. Ng4??). This blunders the knight I cover the g4 square with both my f6-knight and c8-bishop, while White only defends it once with their queen. After double-checking, (8… Bxg4), emotional damage, Black resigns, good game, GG!

Game 2: Ruy López Opening: Jaenisch Gambit, Accepted; and finding a brilliant Greek Gift Sacrifice!
https://www.chess.com/game/live/117071406621

The next time I logged into chess.com a few days later, I once again played the Jaenisch Gambit and this time, White accepted (4. exf5?!). Some of you might have read or watched on chess social media that the Jaenisch Gambit is kind of like a (Falkbeer) Vienna Gambit with reversed colours, and indeed, some of the tactical ideas carry over. Just like with the Vienna Gambit, it’s a relative mistake to accept the gambit!

A brief digression:
The Jaenisch Gambit is an older opening line and was much better known to the 19^th century romantic masters than the Vienna Gambit. From a historical perspective, it is perhaps more correct to say that the Vienna Gambit is a reversed colours Jaenisch Gambit, rather than the other way around!

The logic for Black is to deflect White’s central pawn to the f-file, and then to march the e-pawn forward to e4, pressuring White’s knight. Just like the analogous position in the Vienna Gambit, the opponent’s knight seemingly has nowhere good to go on the board, with e5 and d4 covered by Black’s queen’s knight on c6, and the h4 and g5 squares covered by Black’s queen on d8. In the Vienna Gambit, the only good move for Black is to un-develop the knight and in this game of the Jaenisch, White did the same (5. Ng1).

Interestingly, this where we have a difference from the Vienna Gambit, and it’s related to the first mover advantage of White. In the Vienna Gambit, Black cannot successfully move their queen in front of their king (Qe7) on the e-file to pin the e-pawn attacking their knight. Doing so is a mistake as White can unpin that pawn with the reciprocal Qe2.

In the Jaenisch Gambit, White can successfully pin the pawn (with 5. Qe2) and this is actually their best move! The difference is that White has the extra development of their Ruy López bishop and after Black unpins with (5… Qe7), White can exchange their bishop for the queen’s knight, removing the defender, and allowing their knight to remain on the board (6. Bxc6 bxc6 7. Nd4).

This was a good opportunity for me to learn more about the Jaenisch as I had never previously analysed the Jaenisch Gambit Accepted at depth – I rarely see it! White’s un-developing of their knight is suboptimal, but only if Black immediately launches an attack with (5… Qg5), which forks White’s g2-pawn and the offside f5-pawn. I didn’t recognise this in the game and played the “fine” (5… Nf6) – developing moves are rarely bad – though the evaluation returns to [0.00]. Nonetheless, Black has a better practical position and wins 57% vs White 40%.

The next few moves have neither of us playing optimally, contesting the centre and holding tension. I push back and corral White’s light square bishop to b3 (8… a6 9. Ba4 b5 10. Bb3), something that wasn’t accurate for them. White needed to commit their Ruy López bishop to an exchange. I make an intemperate move with (10… Nd4?) by threatening to trade the knight for White’s light square bishop – this potentially hangs my d5-pawn. However, White misses the opportunity, which justified the haste with the chess.com analytic engine rating (11… Nxb3! 12. Cxb3) an excellent move on my part, with the evaluation at [-3.5] despite material equality. I don’t see the engine accurate line, however, and we soon return to equality [0.00] a few moves later as we enter the middlegame, both castling short (14… O-O 15. O-O).

As I reflected on this game during the analysis, I realised that one of the upsides of my interest in opening quick wins is that it has sensitised me to some tactical patterns. It’s quite a fascinating cognitive phenomenon – at (17. Nd4?) I didn’t immediately see the winning tactic, but nonetheless had an intuition that White had made possibly made a mistake. It’s an aspect of “pattern recognition” that I don’t see written about or talked about much in chess. It’s not only being able to recognise or spot the pattern immediately, also developing the sense of when to spend time to calculate more deeply. In the following position, can you see the winning move for Black?

Now, it’s not too obscure. After (16. dxe4), Black’s e4-pawn threatens White’s knight so the natural impetus for White is that the knight needs to move. At high analytic depth, Stockfish evaluates that the most accurate move is (17. Bxf6), which is somewhat inhuman as recapture with Rxf6 looks like it White achieves nothing other than sacrificing an active piece and helping Black develop their rook. Ignoring this engine curiosity, where should White’s f3-knight go? The engine suggests (17. Nh4 or Ne1) – each with some downsides, but no major problems. White’s (17. Nd4?) seems to move the knight to the centre of the board to an active square, but the d-file is fully open! This means that the knight can be pinned with (17… Rd8!), the winning move. Worse for White, they have no way of keeping the defence of the knight while preventing the follow up (18… c5) – putting “pressure on the pinned piece” – and thus, losing the knight outright!

Now, up a full piece in the middlegame, I felt a sense of momentum. On move 21, again sensitised by some of the “quick wins” tactical patterns, I spent about a minute considering a very tricky move and then committed! The engine wasn’t convinced [-6.7 → 6.0] on analysis, but (21… Bd6!?) was ultimately the move that won the game! White doesn’t appreciate my tactical idea and played an ostensibly rational move (22. Rfd1??), activating their rook to a centre file. As per my annotation, this was a blunder! At lower depth, Stockfish doesn’t even see the tactic I had in mind, but at higher depth it finds it and discovers that there is in fact now a forced line of checkmate in no more than 17-moves! What is the winning move from this position that secures the win?

At lower depth, Stockfish thinks that (22… d3) is the optimal move, winning tempo on White’s queen and pushing the passed d-pawn forward another square closer to promotion. Certainly, this is a good move and White is in some serious trouble. However, the tactic I had in mind from (21… Bd6!?) is a Greek Gift Sacrifice! Note the winning ingredients:

• My bishop is poised to punch a hole on the opponent’s h-file on h2 with check
• My knight has uncontested access to g4
• My queen can access the h-file (on h5) safely!

So, (22… Bxh2+) and White’s position is terminal! The typical sequence occurs, (23. Kxh2 Ng4+ 24. Kg1 Qh5!!). The chess.com analytic engines called Qh5 a brilliancy as it ostensibly sacrifices the rook on d8. I’m happy to accept every brilliancy happily from our computer overlords (🤣), but arguably, this is the engine not really understanding the human logic of the Greek Gift Sacrifice. At this point, “sacrificing” the rook is completely obvious as Black had already committed and launched the winning attack. Arguably, if any move should be rated a brilliancy, it should be (22… Bxh2+) – this is an indication that engine evaluations and recommendations should always be taken with a grain of salt.

I don’t necessarily find the quickest checkmate (I need to work on checkmate puzzles!) but I like to think I found a rather aesthetically pleasing mate! First, (26… Ne3+) a lovely Royal Fork made possible with my f8-rook pinning White’s f2-pawn! And then, I corral White’s king with a coordination of pawns, knight, and rook, for the final blow (30… Qxc7#), checkmate with my queen capturing White’s dark square bishop on c7. Good game, GG!

The big takeaway from these games is to try the Jaenisch Gambit as a winning response against White’s Ruy López Opening. If you like open tactical games, it often results in fun tactical positions. Even better, it is statistically the most successful response by Black!