How can I play the King's Gambit ?

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play4fun64

The King's Gambit is playable up to 2300. OP is 1000+. He can play KG every game as white if he wants to.

tygxc

@21

Do not believe Fischer, do not believe Kramnik, just believe TumoKonnin, he is rated 737.

magipi
tygxc wrote:

@21

Do not believe Fischer, do not believe Kramnik, just believe TumoKonnin, he is rated 737.

When great players say dumb things, the best thing to do is to not believe them. Fischer has especially discredited himself by saying insane things even in his best days ("e4 is best by test", although to be fair that was probably just a joke).

Nowadays the King's gambit is extremely rare at the highest level, but it's not entirely extinct.

Judit Polgar beat Topalov in 2010 (when Veselin was number 2 in the world).

Ivanchuk beat Giri in 2013.

And all this is entirely irrelevant. In online blitz chess almost any opening is playable. Especially at the low levels.

tygxc

@24

"to be fair that was probably just a joke" ++ Fischer did not joke about chess, it was his life.
He never opened 1 d4 on principle. In his 1972 match against Spassky he wanted to play d4 openings to surprise Spassky, but true to his principle he did so by transposing from 1 c4.

"King's gambit is extremely rare at the highest level" ++ Yes, only as a surprise.

"In online blitz chess almost any opening is playable. Especially at the low levels."
++ Yes, in faster time controls and below grandmaster level the opening does not matter and anything is playable. Carlsen plays all kinds of weird stuff in blitz, like 1 a4.
The late IM Basman scored well with 1 h3 in classical over the board games.

Uhohspaghettio1

[Removed: Offensive] ~W

Stop saying stupid bs like "the opening doesn't matter". The opening ALWAYS matters. Even if you know zero theory the opening matters. You already agreed that if the evaluation bar hasn't fluctuated wildly then the opening does matter. This happens all the time at blitz level, especially for titled players.

Impractical

I think the best way to learn King's Gambit is to play over the games of Paul Morphy first. You have to cover up the moves and guess next for each side. After you have spent time asking yourself, "Why was that move played?" -- you won't know at first -- look up annotations by famous authors.

Then try to play it. Capablanca said we must lose hundreds of games to master chess.

AngryPuffer
Uhohspaghettio1 wrote:

[Removed: Offensive] ~W

Stop saying stupid bs like "the opening doesn't matter". The opening ALWAYS matters. Even if you know zero theory the opening matters. You already agreed that if the evaluation bar hasn't fluctuated wildly then the opening does matter. This happens all the time at blitz level, especially for titled players.

the opening matters, but the opening matters much less in a blitz or bullet game compared to a classical game

TumoKonnin
tygxc wrote:

@21

Do not believe Fischer, do not believe Kramnik, just believe TumoKonnin, he is rated 737.

Is the OP a GM? Exactly. Fischer’s line can be easily be busted with the bishop’s gambit variation, and a lower rated player does not play like fischer or kramnick.

chessterd5

Paul Morphy An Evolution of Chess Theory would be a very good book to read.

AngusByers

The King's Gambit is a lot of fun to play, but you do have to keep your nerves and wits about you. There are two branches, the King's Knight Gambit (1. e4 e5 2. f4 ef 3. Nf3 ... which is what most people refer to when they just say King's Gambit) and the King's Bishop Gambit ((1. e4 e5 2. f4 ef 3. Bc4 ...). I believe Fischer's opinion that the King's Gambit was busted was only in reference to the King's Knight Gambit, and while his d6 move took much of the sting out, it is generally not considered the bust he originally believed it to be. My preference is for the King's Bishop Gambit, as some of the lines for the King's Knight Gambit are very hairy. In the KBG, White is ok with losing the right to castle by Kf1 if Black goes for the Queen check via the h file.

GM Simon Williams has some lessons on the King's Gambit which are good (https://www.chess.com/lessons/crush-with-the-kings-gambit). You do have to look into it to understand the ideas, and learn some of the more tricky lines though, so don't ignore theory. You're going to weaken your King trying to obtain a big centre and a strong attack. I pretty much just play against the bots myself, but here's one of my favourite games against the Antonio-bot. I've played it against some of the lower ones too, but their tendency to blunder their Queen makes those games less interesting. While the bot doesn't make the best moves available, in this game it is not entirely obvious as with the lower rated bots (note, it didn't blunder it's Queen, as saving its Queen allowed for mate via Rh8# Once the attack gets going, Black is just bullied into oblivion. However, it is a two edged sword, and while you will win some very fun attacking games, you will also lose in an equally spectacular fashion. It is a great opening to train your tactical vision and to work on your calculations.

The 2nd Game was against the top level of a chess App I had on my phone, but not sure how it would correspond to a Chess.com rating. It had a bizarre way of playing Black on move 4 (up to then it's a standard line), with 4. ... Kd8, which was a pain as working out how to proceed was never going prepare me for any other opponent (no human is going to play that way, and I've never seen any other bot do that either, but the app on my phone did it every time! (I called it the "Stupid Phone Line")

Anywhere, here's where I cut the "Stupid Phone Line":