Choosing between traps and safer strategies

I have been going back and forth lately over whether to use traps or to make stronger moves that will pay off later in my games. This is a tough decision for me.

I like to quickly gain an advantage over my opponent. I find that having an advantage to exploit makes it easier to over work my defensive opponent's pieces. I also like the psychological factors involved. I have won some games here by resignation, simply by jumping all over my opponent, with some sort of trap or really aggressive play that weaker players tend to fall for. The longer a game goes on, I feel like the factors like my opponents choice of defense, our pieces left, and our relative positions tend to show my opponent my basket. I also think I am more likely to make more mistakes as a game progresses, than if it is over soon, or much easier to manage suddenly.

I am curious as to the consensus. How have you, as an individual, dealt with this through your development? If there is already an indepth forum you have written in, please refer me to it. I would love to hear all of your ideas. I wouldn't mind some good debate.

 Simple answer...do you want to improve? or play gambits/traps/trick openings?

I was already cracking a smile by the end of the first paragraph. I have to say I love the strategy. I like it when people like you,make me laugh and keep me on my toes at the same time. That is "spayshule" as they say, just a little further south of me. I am good sport, though I would like to gather the information I was after, I admire your style so much, I am thinking about erasing my name, and just penciling in yours as OP. Carry on Greg, carry on....

I am in no way trying to seem condescending when I ask, why would playing gambits, not be a good tactic ? I am asking this because, I thought that certain gambit openings where considered good openings. The King and Queen's gambits respectively seem to be really good for strong players. I guess e4 or e5 is usually safer. I get bored easy. I would love to master about 5 or 6 different openings. I am still young. Talk to me.

Queen's gambit is not really a gambit. But yes the King's Gambit and others

are perfectly reasonable even against best play. Something like the Englund Gambit however

are based only on hoping for trappy play.

From experience, playing just to spring a trap on someone often ends badly.

I prefer using a safe strategy, unless I see an amazingly huge return on the trap. Of course, I also like playing for the endgame. I play completely differently than you most likely do.

playing for traps will never increase either your skill or your rating. what if you played the same guy twice?  he's likely only falling for the trap once, and then you have to make strong moves.  it's always, always best to be aware of traps, but play strong moves exclusively; playing only for traps will trap you under 1700.  :)

Try playing w/o the Queen, via exchange or otherwise. Makes for a challenge.

The only time I would even consider a "trap-move" in the narrow sense is if - in case my opponent doesn't fall for it - the resulting position would at least not be worse than it was before.

There's a substitute for traps on higher level play, though. If I have the option to do so, I always go for a position which presents my opponent with more opportunities to make mistakes.  

I've done this already. I love to try to take my opponents queen when he can only take back with the king, there by, wrecking his/her ability to castle.It seems most players don't like toplay with a vulnerable king. I am willing to work with small advantages to start. I can usually exploit them into something bigger.

Do you mind elaborating with some examples of this strategy? The only thing I can think of would be, to make moves that leave so many possibilities to calculate, that choosing his/her next move would be really difficult. I try this too on occasion. My experience is this is apt to blow up in my face.

Losing the castling rights in a queenless middlegame usually isn't a big deal.

That's about what I meant. So how to avoid this backfiring? The answer is to only complicate the position if you are still able to "see" what's in store for both you and your opponent down the line and that this includes certain "opportunities" for him to blunder. Don't deliberately make moves where the situation is just unclear to you, for it might not be unclear to him. Many say we should try to complicate things when playing against stronger players, for else they'd crush us slowly, positionally. But my own personal experience is rather the opposite: Stronger players see more and so it would rather be me who gets the short end of the stick even faster. Thus I rather try to complicate things when playing against weaker players and play it safe against stronger ones. Of course that doesn't work all the time, for the opponent might have just the opposite plans ...