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Hello everybody. It's jrobi. I wanted to do a quick video on a chess trap in the King's
Gambit Declined and I've touched on the King's Gambit before in some of my other videos,
in particularly my Exploring Bobby Fischer's video where I looked at his play as white
in King's Gambit accepted lines. He was a very strong player as white in the King's
Gambit except that in--he won all of his matches in those lines except for one. But in this
video I want to focus on black's position and I want to talk about a possible trap that
black has at its disposal. Now, as with all my trap videos, you'll probably find the most
use for these in your blitz games. If you play these traps in standard matches where
you have a lot of time to look at positions and your opponent has a lot of time to look
at positions, they're less likely to succeed for sure. But this definitely has some merit
in it and the reason is because generally in blitz matches if you're playing under really
tight time controls, people don't take a long time to look at certain positions and if they're
unfamiliar with the position and it's new to them, they're much more likely to make
mistakes or even just take material that you lay out for them as a trap. And in this position
here, actually we'll just go back for those of you who weren't familiar with the King's
Gambit opening. The King's Gambit opening goes pawn to E4, black plays pawn to E5 and
then white offers up the gambit pawn hoping to peel off one of black's centre pawns. Now,
in this position, instead of capturing--which is completely fine to do, by the way. If you're
a black player, you can capture that pawn and maintain a very nice position throughout
the whole match if you're careful. Now, that being said, if your opponent is a really strong
player in the King's Gambit accepted lines and you're not, you'll have to be very careful
with your positional play going forward because there are some dangers in the King's Gambit
accepted that you can get in trouble with as a black player if you're not familiar with
them. But from here we're not going to take the pawn actually. We're going to decline
the offer and we're going to play bishop to C5. Now, bishop to C5 is going to serve two
fundamental roles for black. First of all, you're offering up a pawn for the taking,
so bishop to C5 basically you're leaving your E5 pawn unprotected. So if white wants, white
can come in and capture this pawn for free in the current position. Now, more importantly
for black, if white does come and capture this pawn is that bishop to C5 creates a very
strong presence along this diagonal which is going to be key as you're going to see
as we go down the line here. So if white captures the pawn, black has a brutal attack that it
can unleash on the enemy king and that's simply queen to H4 delivering check. So black will
come in and deliver the check and white only has two choices. White can push the king to
E2, but unfortunately, after the queen comes to E4, its checkmate. So what the white player
will probably do in this position is play pawn to G3 at which point you can come in
now and deliver just a deadly fork on the king and the rook. White will block with the
queen. You can come in and take the rook and white's most probable move in this position
is to play knight to F3 and that's simply because white's going to try to capture the
queen by trapping it in this position. But unfortunately for white, this bishop here
on C5 is creating a very big problem for white and it's basically going to make white incapable
of capturing this queen by trapping it, so this bishop here is serving a very important
role in this position. So from here now as a black player, all you need to simply do
is develop another piece with knight to C6 because you want to maintain this bishop's
presence along this diagonal and now you get another piece into the play. And from here,
white's now going to play pawn to C3, eying up D4 to remove the bishop's influence on
this diagonal. And from here you can play a nice little move: Pawn to D5. White will
most likely capture the pawn here and even if it doesn't it doesn't really matter because
what we're trying to do here is we're just trying to open up access to this diagonal
to G4 for this bishop because the bishop to G4 is going to force white to do a queen trade
in order to take care of the positional problem that it's going to face. So from here, after
white captures, or even if it doesn't capture, you can simply move the king off to F8 because
the king is in check and now white will try to succeed with its plan by blocking this
bishop, but it's too late for white because from here now you can simply play bishop to
G4. And white is in a very dangerous position that basically forces it to do a queen trade.
So from here you can trade the queens off and now that the queens have been removed
from the board you can simply come down now with your bishop and capture on D6 and you're
going to have a very comfortable game from this position. So what I'd like to do now
is actually flip the board over and we're going to take a look at the trap lines from
the white player's perspective. Now if you're playing white and black goes into these trap
lines, the best move in this position for white is simply to play knight to F3. And
after white plays knight to F3, with solid positional play white should have a fairly
decent position throughout the match. And when I paired the computers off against each
other in this position, white did have an advantage and then white got into the black
castle position. But the good news for the black player is that it took white a long
time to do so and that's with perfect computer play. And even when white got into the castle
position a little bit, the computer actually had the white queen peel off to regain the
lost pawn that it has dropped earlier, and so while there is some risk for black to lay
out the trapping lines, it doesn't provide a crushing advantage for white right away
and that's good news for the black player if you want to try the trapping lines in your
blitz games. So I enjoyed going over the video and I hope you guys find it useful and definitely
looking forward to your feedback on that, whether you use it as black or you see a black
player use it against you and you counter with the knight to F3. So take care. Hope
you enjoy the video, and we will see you next time!