Aggressive Chess Opening Discussion #5: King's Gambit Series: King's Gambit Accepted

For this, I will be going over some sideline openings from the last post. I wouldn't consider them good openings, but I guess they should be worth mentioning. I'm not discussing about other main options for black or white. Just some sidelines. 

King's Gambit Accepted: Blachly Gambit

Funny enough, playing Nc3 transposes into the Vienna game.

King's Gambit Accepted: McDonnell Gambit

Again, this transposes into the Vienna Game.

King's Gambit Accepted: Ghulam Kassim Gambit

King's Gambit Accepted: Lolli Gambit

If you guys have different opinions on it, well, I'm no king's gambit player, so I could be wrong.

Wow you have made 5 forums on an effectively refuted opening. I don’t understand how you are still so interested in it after the numerous responses backing that the KG is bad. If you are to improve as a player I would suggest you start playing 2.Nf3 like the rest of us.

@FizzyBand, I don't play this opening. This is for people that play the King's Gambit. I play other openings. The point of me posting these is to give people some ideas on how to play this opening. I'm not interested. I'm just simply trying to give people some ideas.

@FizzyBand, I'm making a series on every opening as if it was my own encyclopedia. I said this on my first post called "Chess Opening Discussion: Introduction". Although, Thanks for the reminder.

It’s good that you don’t play it, but why would you promote a bad opening?

@FizzyBand, Simply because there are King's Gambit players. I do it for the sake of chess itself!

g5 and the game's over

ACcepted

I like Lolli Gambit. Because after 5... Kxf7 6. h4, the king is in an awkward position. Black cannot check the king with the queen because of 7. Rxh4. White is ready to control the center and/or develop their pieces. Though Black may play 6... gxf3, we can go 7. Qxf3. It develops a piece and lets 8. 0-0 safe for White (instead of 7. gxf3)

I don't really care if Black has more material.

@ChessPlayer0169, I can somewhat agree. Only if black doesn't know how to survive white's attack. Black is still better after Bxf7.

Don't listen to these keyboard warriors ESMolen. These are the kind of people who see a -0.3 score in Stockfish when down a pawn and thinks that means white is worse. I would love to see them play against stockfish as black in the KG and watch them get massacred in under 25 moves.
This is what is really funny, I looked it up just to see what lines Fizzyband who is the self-proclaimed KG refuter plays to refute the King's gambit, he is so sure he doesn't even want you to post on it. I'm sure he has an 95% win ratio - oh wait no he has won 41% of his games against the KG he most commonly declines the gambit with 3 Bc5, where he has won 35% of games  Mr IWantToBeSmart is even more impressive. He has a 35% win ratio against the king's gambit. After g5 he says "the game is over" yet his win score in this specific refutation is 19%   Truly amazing proof of a refutation guys. Nobody should ever play or post about this opening that you guys have obviously mastered. 

@macrosgambit, should I be saying thank you...? This post kinda confused me. Besides, King's Gambit isn't usually played at a high level. Which could probably be why some higher rated players say that this opening can be refuted by certain moves.

Has been played by Bronstein, Spassky, Fischer, Shirov, Short, Grischuk as white, many top players like e.g. Timman and Anand couldn’t refute over the board and GM Shaw found it interesting enough to write a very thorough book on it so I wouldn’t care about “refutations” until you’re close to that level. Anyway, it’s a lot of fun to play and a better training in tactics and attack then for example the Berlin imho. I think it makes sense to play it and learn a lot from it  you reach a level it runs out of steam. Remember you score points depending on the reactions of your opponents on the board, not On the forum... 

It is played pretty regularly in Blitz by top GMs including Carlsen, and unless they go rogue and play some absurd line like the Steinitz position out of the opening is usually fine with attacking chances for both sides. But even the Steinitz isn't that bad, Carlsen destroyed a series of high rated GMs with the Steinitz in his banter blitz series.  Ginger GM has  a number of video series on the KG (chess.com, his own website and chess base) where he discusses lines where white is doing well, although you have to be a very good attacking player to use the lines he suggests. Daniel King GM came out with a new dvd a few months ago on Chess base.  The most detailed freely available discussion is the 10 part video series by hanging pawns on youtube. Note each of these authors disagrees with each other as to their recommendations, which is fine.  Alexei Fedorov is an instructive player in terms of what when a high level GM uses it regularly in classical OTB.  Chess games has a series of his games from the 90s- 2000s including 15 wins, 4 losses and 9 draws.  What is interesting is that almost nobody plays what textbook writers believe are the most challenging variations for white against him, because actually those lines (such as the Fischer Defence with G5) put black in a very precarious position if anything goes wrong and if white is better booked up.
Why do GMs not play it more in OTB?  Because computer prep means that most GMs find they get better results by preparing lines where they get a very small advantage a small chance of winning, significant chance of a draw, and low chance of losing. Masters games databases give only a 10% chance of a draw for the KG, although the win percentage is high, the chess.com database has white with 40% win ratio, versus 38% for Nf3.  365chess has a 44% win ratio with 36.5% for black, chessbase 8 million games gives the same. Lichess's database of all players includes 1 million games in the KG with a 51% win rate and less than 5% draw rate.

1. I didn’t use an engine. I simply read over the analysis of strong GMs and theoreticians who obviously know more than both of us, and they declared it basically refuted. 

2. If you look at the KG, the evaluation is going to be worse than just -0.3.

3. I learned the refutation (3.Nf6) fairly recently from the analysis of GM Wahls.

4. I don’t normally play 1...e5 so my results are fairly irrelevant, and the KGs I’ve played with Black are few and far between, and generally older, before I learned of the refutation.

5. It’s silly to insult me with “the self-proclaimed KG refuter” because I while I (correctly) claimed it to be refuted, I never claimed I was the one who refuted it.

6. If you still want to not believe me and trash  me (my rating is nearly 1000 points higher than yours) and my KG opinions (though the refutation is more fact than opinion) you can read GM Matthias Wahls analysis here

Nobody at the top plays the KG cause of the modern 3.Nf6. White looks fine in databases because of old games where Black didn't know much.

 You clearly have not looked into the subject in any serious detail, read or viewed the latest major analysis on the openings or reviewed top game practice. You are  regurgitating one GM's opinion without reference to the literature on the subject or even the games databases, then telling someone they shouldn't be discussing it. 
The Schallops variation is very well known and is not considered the most critical try against the KG. Lichess.org database of shows a 52% win rate 6% draw in that variation in online games since 2010. If you exclude players below 2500, then it barely changes to 50% wins 6% draws. Chessbase has the most powerful cloud analysis of stockfish and shows a positive score for white at 25 depth then -0.3 at 55 depth, negative 0.29 with Komodo, despite being a pawn down, which means it considers that even at 55 depth with optimal defence white has significant initiative for the pawn.  Leela (LCZero) neural network engine, now considered the leading engine for GM play gives -0.08 despite being down a pawn. 
This line is rarely played by GMs but Chessbase shows a 70% masters level OTB win ratio in the main line after move 6.  Think you can do better with your pet line? Set the engine on max with the opening database on and see if you can survive 25 moves from 3 Nf6.  

Ok, but his is just a collection of database facts (the databases include tons of old games where black had no idea what to do against the KG) and engine evals. It doesn’t mean anything unless you can provide a refutation of GM Wahls’ analysis.

I have to agree with macrosgambit. Just because someone beat Carlsen using the Schallop Defense some players now think that must be the refutation. It's not that clear. GM's like John Shaw, Simon Williams, and Daniel King who have done books or videos on the KG give different ideas as White but the one thing the three of them seem to agree on is that the Modern Defense 3...d5 appears to be the toughest test to the opening.

The interesting thing about the KG is that you may have difficulty against a particular line, if you give it a go yourself you may find it is actually really tough work from black and or you lose quickly. I have never had to look deep into the theory for the Modern Defence or Schallop because they personally haven't troubled me. I looked into the Fischer Defence for g4 really deep as a lot of people play that in correspondence games.  I agree with Simon Williams take on that . The line that troubles me  in most in practice is the Becker Defence, none of the top GMs give it much attention as if you follow the main line White ends up winning almost all games at master level. But you need to be comfortable with making it to 1.e4e52.f4exf43.Nf3h64.d4g55.Nc3Bg76.g3fxg37.hxg3d68.Bc4Bg49.Rf1Qd710.Qd3Bh511.Be3 without getting crushed, if you are playing blitz and forget to play g3 you are in a lot of trouble. It feels more like a Latvian gambit than a KG. 
But, when I go for that, or the Fischer Defence as black in blitz I have not had good results.