IM Rajlich Claims the King's Gambit is Solved by Rybka Cluster

Yeah, they should have made it something that GM's would be annoyed with The QGD

Few people realize it, but Matt Damon and Magnus Carlsen are actually cousins, Alexander Morozevich is married to Gerri Halliwell of the Spice Girls, and Anatoly Karpov is an oil millionaire.

glad this was a joke because i died a little inside when i heard this. i love the king's gambit and i'd still play it even if it was 'solved'. it's just too much fun.

I was not particularly convinced by the depth of the published analysis - the least they could have done was indicating the winning deviation for black in all historical KGA games in which white wins despite not playing 3. Be2. If they had been for real.

Actually I think their April Fool was clever. Every year I go to Chessbase on April 1st looking for the April Fool. A few years ago they made it harder by publishing improbable but true stories earlier than the real April Fool. I was uncertain this year which the real one was until I saw this story with the interview cleverly supposed to have occurred on April 1st. For me the clincher, was the complete lack of analysis or game examples with the published game: 1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4 3.Be2!d5 4.exd5! and White can hold a draw against any attack Black can play. ½–½ 

For any chess player and especially Chessbase, this is a ludicrous over-simplification but very funny!

Very well-written article which will obviously get a serious coverage & boost ChessBase's popularity. However, it still looks like a hoax, because: 1) their explanation on how they could reduce the amount of calculation looks too good to be true b) why would anyone let them spend millions of dollars-worth of processing time on King's Gambit? Looks dubious.

As long as they didn't report that they busted the Ponziani, I'm OK.

http://chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=8051

but most miniatures come out of it.

This April Fools joke has a precedent that likely inspired the Chessbase prank.  The precedent was cooked up by Martin Gardner, who wrote a monthly column on mathematical diversions for the Scientific American.  His April, 1975 column entitled "Mathematical Games: Six Sensational Discoveries that Somehow or Another have Escaped Public Attention" described six amazing findings that would not be known to the public for years due to the backlog of scientific articles awating publication.  Included in the column were such spectacular discoveries as a refutation of the Theory of Relativity and a counterexample to the Four Color Theorem from topology.  Of course, all the findings were hoaxes - this was the April issue, get it?

Anyway, getting to the chess part of Gardner's article: one of the discoveries mentioned came from a chess-playing computer built in 1973 by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.  As Gardner reported, the computer was designed by Richard Pinkleaf with the help of former world champion Botvinnik.  Pinkleaf called the machine MacHic because sometimes it played as if it were drunk.  However, the artificial intelligence innovation being tested by MacHic was that the machine could learn from its mistakes by recording all its games in memory.

In early 1974, Pinkleaf turned on MacHic and had it play against itself, completing a game every 1.5 seconds.  Seven months later, the machine announced an extraordinary result: it had established, with a high degree of probability, that the move 1. h4 is a win for White.  Of course, exhaustive analysis was not possible, but in MacHic's "game tree" for the opening, every branch of the tree was carried out to a position that any chess master would unhesitatingly judge to be resignable.

The ever playful Gardner added his own conspiracy thinking to this story, describing how world leaders were coercing Pinkleaf into destroying MacHic and burning the analysis.  Kissinger and Breznev would have a meeting to discuss the impact of MacHic's discovery on world chess.  When you read the article now, everything sounds so outlandish, but it's funny how many people believed it at the time.  David Levy even devoted a chapter to it in his 1976 book "Chess and Computers".

So, I guess the King's Gambit prank is the latest variation on this April Fools joke.  Checking around the Internet, it appears a large number of people fell for it the same way many bought the 1975 joke.  And, once again, chess writers are even quoting the bogus finding.  For example, in the November, 2013 Chess Life, on page 39 Alex Dunne's comment after 1. e4 e5 2. f4 exf4 3. Nf3 reads, "And here a laboratory Rybka, using 3000 processor cores running for four months determined that only 3. Be2 holds and all other white moves lose." 

This so-called prank is extremely cheap to say the very least.

The article is still there: http://en.chessbase.com/post/rajlich-busting-the-king-s-gambit-this-time-for-sure

It has been three years. It's clearly an April Fool's joke, at the very least put that in the bottom of the article. Some people could be genuinely mislead into believing that this lively opening is busted. Not everyone is aware of how computers work. (I for one knew from the start that it was hoax, because if we are able to bust openings like King's gambit, it would be easy to bust chess itself).