Tips for winning with the fried Liver attack

There are two main ways players seem to defend against the fried liver attack when I play it. Any tips for how to continue in these two scenarios?

Two knights defence> What is the main line, or best options for white after black has taken the rook?

And also this counter attacking defence. Quite a few players seem to beat me using this method. What are the best options for white?

Hi Chris,

You may have some trouble with that, I think like many openings from that Era the Fried Liver attack is no longer considered viable. That said, have you tried defending it? If you have a Winboard set up of some kind, preferably with a UCI options; you might try playing a few practice games against an engine set for say 100 or so Elo Points higher than yourself and see if it unearths any lines you cannot defend and add those options to your repetiore. I uploaded a copy of my own Winboard inteface some time ago if that is helpful to you. http://www.chess.com/download/view/crafty-thumb-drive 

While I expect you've done something like this, I have pasted in below Shredders 3 lines of best play, none of them favor white; but as I said, a few practice games defending the position might give you better ideas when attacking it. BB.

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9.a3 is a bad move. Try 9.Qe4, or even 9.0-0 and 9.Bb3- all of them are much better. Or, even better, forget about 6.Nxf7, and play instead 6.d4! which does give white some advantage.

In that bad line, 9.a3? Nxc2+ 10.Kd1 Nxa1 11.Nxd5 (only move deserving consideration) 11...Kd6? is another mistake- but Black can do much better with Buecker's 11...c6! or (probably best) 11...Qh4! when White is in deep trouble.

In the other line (actually the main line) with 5...Na5! you can try the popular 8.Bd3 instead of 8.Be2, although Black is doing fine there as well.

Blackbirdx61: Engine dumps in such positions is totally pointless. If you want to use an engine, guide it to what looks like a rational move sequance- else you will get a bunch of stupid moves. Take for example 11...Κd6? in your analysis, which gives white a very strong attack:

I think Qe4 after Nb4 is theory. Only when you have defended the c2 pawn can you then proceed with a3 and something like d4 to pressurize the pinned pieces in the centre. Even maybe Bf4 when the pawn is pinned id very strong and I have good results with this but remember Qe4 is essential otherwise black can just about survive!

Hi Chris,
I was rather suprised the IM was able to find any examples of the opening in modern practice. A search of my own TWIC DB scored no hits but all those games are from 2015;

Dark Magician seems to be correct in that while,
A Query of games in your original line only produced 6 hits, to include historical games moving the search back to Nb4 produced 32 games; which I think is both a managable and yet useful number to study. I have bundled them into a pgn file. Hope they are useful to you. BB.

http://www.anar-mura.com/Chess/FriedLiverStudy.pgn

thanks for that Blackbirdx61

Nice examples thanks