Vienna Gambit | Fascinating Line in Nc3 declined!

#vienna #viennagambit 

Every now and then, I play an intermediate player who clearly hasn't encountered the Vienna Gambit before. This is often very interesting as they will often play some creative counterattacks and enter lines that I rarely see!

In this game, my Egyptian friend declined the Vienna Gambit with Nc6 (1. e4 e5 2. Nc3 Nf6 3. f4 Nc6) and then, after the usual captures and pawn advance (4. fxe5 Nxe5 5. d4), they spent almost a minute to play a fascinating countergambit with (5... Nxe4). In essence, they gambit their knight but I'm sure they were thinking that they could recapture, with potentially a mating threat with Qh4 which comes with check.

However, if you're a Vienna Gambit fan, be reassured that this seemingly robust counterattack doesn't work and in fact, Stockfish rates this as an outright blunder [+4].

Part of the trickiness here is that our minds are often not good at visualising where the knight ends up due to their L-shaped moves.  After we capture the knight and Black plays their queen check move (6. Nxe4 Qh4+), our knight on e4 can move to both block the check along the dark square diagonal and it covers the checking square of e4!  Black might have thought that we had to block with the g-pawn, but this isn't the case after we moved our knight to capture!

And suddenly, the queen on h4 is in an awkward position. As it's now no longer part of a coordinated attacking plan, I now can harass the queen with development of my minor pieces.  On move 8, Stockfish evaluates that the best move for Black is retreating their queen all the way back to d8, but this can be hard to accept if the goal is keeping pieces developed.

However, this loss of tempo by Black, and the fact that I'm a full piece up, means that I have relatively simple opportunities to force trade pieces, first a bishop, and then the queen.  As we enter the middle game, Black castles kingside, opposite to me as I castled long.  So, the next tactic - pawn storm!  I manage to crack open Black's h-file, and the black king is trapped in the remains of their castle! On move 28, Black resigns with unavoidable mate next turn. GG!

Game on chess.com: https://www.chess.com/game/live/77858428075