Are there reasons to play King's Gambit over Queen's Gambit?

Engine says the King's Gambit is -0.53. That is winning. If you can squeeze a win out of a -0.53 position with perfect play, post it down below.

You cannot judge a position with such simplicity. It means black is better... but it doesn't mean black is going to have an easy time converting it. But yeah, there's a reason it's no longer being played in serious classical Chess.

@nTzT Lasker-Janowski, Berlin 1910. Lasker won with the KG the last time it was played in the WCC, but it was a pretty horribly played game. I kind of cringed when I looked through the moves. Spassky beat Seirawan in the 1985 Candidates with the KG. In 2015 Ivanchuk beat Karjakin, and in 2012 Polgar beat Topalov in final rounds of major tournaments, though both games were rapid, but both are really beautiful.

You can play whatever u want... king's gambit, danish gambit or even the bongcloud... it doesn't matter unless u are like 2300+... openings are absolutely valueless for anything lower than that especially in classical or slow chess where you have the time to think

I completely disagree with this claim. You are saying that openings are worthless for 99.999% of players? Only 1/100000+ people benefit from opening study? Cmon. I know it's hyperbole but still, openings teach you a lot about the game, and how to reach a good midgame. I don't mean memorization but learning how to play certain positions.

@nTzT - there are two separate questions here: 1. which opening do you choose, and 2. that you study it.

Kartikeya is 100% correct that the opening you choose doesn't really matter. I went through basically every common opening in the lichess database, from the "good ones" to the "bad ones," and in games played by non-masters, they all had roughly the same win% of about ± 1%. I was actually pretty shocked, but the evidence is incontrovertible.

"Is studying theory valuable" is not the same question. Unfortunately, there's no way to scientifically test this just looking at data at hand. You would have to conduct a double-blind experiment where one group of players studied extensively opening theory, and the other group did not, but they dedicated the same amount of time to playing and learning chess otherwise.

Personally, I think it's valuable. I think that it's obvious that if you know more theory than your opponent, you're generally going to get out of the opening in a superior position, and this will increase your chances of winning. Does it mean that studying openings means that you will win? Of course not, but I believe that it will increase your odds of winning, though it's probably worth no more than a couple of hundred rating points. You won't go from 1000 to 2000 by studying openings, but you may go from 1000 to 1250.

But I have to admit, this last bit is just conjecture.

I suppose it depends on what one defines as the opening. But when I try to help newer players I try to teach them where pieces belong since they doom themselves sometimes from very early on.

@nTzT - well, I don't know what you consider an opening. But here's just one example: The QG is considered by many as the "best" opening, and the Bird is considered by many to be one of the worst. What are the numbers? The QG wins 52% and loses 44%. The Bird? It wins 51% and loses 45%. The King's Gambit? 53/44. The Ruy? 51/44. The Polish? 51/45. You'd think that a "trash" opening like the Alekhine would do badly, but no: 47/49, black actually does better than white.

The question is, why does the Alekhine do better than so many other openings when it's "trash"? I think the answer is simple: knowledge of opening theory. The opening is rare and white probably sees it maybe once every 100-200 games. Black, on the other hand, plays the Alekhine probably more than half the time as black and reflexively knows what to do. This gives black not only a good idea what best responses are, but black will also have a huge time advantage. At least once every session someone premoves Nf3 on move 2 and I have a free pawn. If they don't premove, there's almost always a huge delay before playing move two. Usually they play Nc3 because they don't want to go into mainline theory, which I'm still prepared for. If they push e5, I'm overjoyed because I know Alekhine theory and theirs usually stops at move 5 at best.

So while I don't have any proof that knowing opening theory is helpful, I feel pretty confident in my conclusion.

I don't think interpreting the stats that way is wise, but I know what you mean. You mean the Bird is the worst of whatever we consider actual openings and not weird things like b4 or a4, I guess it makes sense. 

I agree that whoever plays an opening will probably get more experience than their opponent if it's not a popular one. It all depends. There's a lot of factors that go into these things, sometimes an engine disadvantage of -0.5 isn't as bad as the practical advantage of knowing the position well when there's tons of issues that an opponent has to deal with.

I have some lines in the English that I play that are definitely not "good" but they have some tricks to them and it's just a bit of a gamble.

Not sure which database you are looking at but, the Bird definitely does not do too great:


(2200+ Rapid and Classical)


Black seems to have better chances of winning when facing the Bird when comparing with the other main openings. 

It gets worse for some of these openings when you follow the mainline theory - but of course most opponents wouldn't be that prepared.

I think we all are so used to seeing the top grandmasters all the time(in streams, in tournaments etc) that we lose track of just how insignificant certain things are to us which are of massive value to them,  openings are one of those things. 

I remember a video from backyard professor(i know he is sometimes joked about here but i think he offers some insight on lower level chess) where his friend who was 1800 elo lost to a 1350 elo guy in a well known opening which his friend knew... the reason was that the 1350 guy played a move that his friend never saw, the position became tactical and he miscalculated.

Didn't carlsen play a game vs a GM in his stream where he basically gave his opponent 7 moves (played Nf3 Ng1 repetaedly till 7 moves). He still won though because the opponent got e5, d5, c5, knights out but then what?  what to do next? I bet carlsen can give any <2000 player 20 moves to do whatever they want and he would still win, shows how openings don't matter at all

My point is, we should not get fooled by all the super GMs talking about openings, pawn structures etc. They don't matter for 99.999% of people since they are not good enough to even notice errors, let alone punishing them. Anything out of the ordinary increases our chances of making mistakes exponentially.

For example you can play your "main" opening vs carlsen and if he plays the mainline then u can maintain equality for many moves... however if he instead lashes out with h5 g5 which you have never seen before then you would likely start to make huge errors. Btw this is not an attack on "you" personally, by "you" i mean the 99.99999% of the players which i referred to earlier, this includes IMs.