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The Anti-French
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Dec 24, 2011
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#23
Melvin - if you're looking for a strong gambit line coming out of the Tarrasch, I recommend the Korchnoi Gambit...
Usually if I feel that my opponent is going to play the French, I pull out a few knights then lock my pawns in the Advance Variation, using the knights to defend them.
Based on intuition alone, f4 seems dubious to me. If I annotated a game with 1.e4 e6 2.f4, I would mark f4 with a ?!. If you had a knight developed or a bishop at Bc4, I would perhaps mark it with a !? because then it wouldn't be so weak and might even lead to interesting complications.
The one good thing about f4 is the psychology factor; I doubt any French Defence player would bother researching or analysing f4.