The King’s Gambit is a chess opening that begins with the moves:
1. e4 e5
2. f4
White offers a pawn to divert the black e-pawn. If Black accepts the gambit, White has two main plans. The first is to play d4 and Bxf4, regaining the gambit pawn with central domination. The alternative plan is to play Nf3 and Bc4 followed by 0-0, when the semi-open f-file allows White to barrel down onto the weakest point in Black’s position, the pawn on f7. Theory has shown that in order for Black to maintain the gambit pawn, he may well be forced to weaken his kingside, with moves such as …g5 or odd piece placement (e.g. …Nf6–h5). A downside to the King’s Gambit is that White weakens his own king’s position, exposing it to the latent threat of …Qh4+ (or …Be7–h4+). With a black pawn on f4, White cannot usually respond to the check with g3, but if the king is forced to move then it also loses the right to castle.
The King’s Gambit is one of the oldest documented openings, as it was examined by the 17th-century Italian chess player Giulio Cesare Polerio. It is also in an older book by Luis Ramírez de Lucena.
The King’s Gambit was one of the most popular openings in the 19th century, but is infrequently seen at master level today, as Black can obtain a reasonable position by returning the extra pawn to consolidate. There are two main branches, depending on whether or not Black plays 2…exf4: the King’s Gambit Accepted (KGA) and the King’s Gambit Declined (KGD).
The King’s Gambit was one of the most popular openings for over 300 years, and has been played by many of the strongest players in many of the greatest brilliancies, including the Immortal Game. Nevertheless, players have held widely divergent views on it. François-André Danican Philidor (1726–1795), the greatest player and theorist of his day, wrote that the King’s Gambit should end in a draw with best play by both sides, stating that “a gambit equally well attacked and defended is never a decisive [game], either on one side or the other.” Writing over 150 years later, Siegbert Tarrasch, one of the world’s strongest players in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pronounced the opening “a decisive mistake” and wrote that “it is almost madness to play the King’s Gambit.” Similarly, future World Champion Bobby Fischer wrote a famous article, “A Bust to the King’s Gambit”, in which he stated, “In my opinion the King’s Gambit is busted. It loses by force” and offered his Fischer Defense (3…d6) as a refutation. FM Graham Burgess, in his book The Mammoth Book of Chess, noted the discrepancy between the King’s Gambit and Wilhelm Steinitz’s accumulation theory. Steinitz had argued that an attack is only justified when a player has an advantage, and an advantage is only obtainable after the opponent makes a mistake. Since 1…e5 does not look like a blunder, White should therefore not be launching an attack.
None of these pronouncements, however, have been proved to be actual refutations of the King’s Gambit. In 2012, an April Fool prank by Chessbase in association with Vasik Rajlich—inventor of chess engine Rybka—claimed to have proven to a 99.99999999% certainty that the King’s Gambit is at best a draw for White. In a later post, owning up to the prank, Rajlich estimated that “we’re still probably a good 25 or so orders of magnitude away from being able to solve something like the King’s Gambit. If processing power doubles every 18 months for the next century, we’ll have the resources to do this around the year 2120, plus or minus a few decades.”
While the King’s Gambit Accepted was a staple of Romantic era chess, the opening began to decline with the rise of positional play in the 1870s, although King’s Gambit Declined variants remained popular among high-level players until World War I. By the 1920s, 1.e4 openings fell into disrepute and were ridiculed by hypermodern players such as Richard Reti and Aron Nimzovitch, and players like Frank Marshall and Jose Raul Capablanca, who had been known as dashing attackers prior to WWI, largely switched to 1.d4 and 1.c4 openings and positional play.
After World War II, 1.e4 openings became acceptable again, with David Bronstein being the first grandmaster in decades to use the King’s Gambit in serious matches. He inspired Boris Spassky to also take up the King’s Gambit, although Spassky was not willing to risk using the opening in any of his World Championship matches.
The King’s Gambit is rare in modern grandmaster play, and even rarer at the top level. A handful of grandmasters have continued to use it, including Joseph Gallagher, Hikaru Nakamura, Nigel Short, and Alexei Fedorov. It was also part of the arsenal of David Bronstein, who almost singlehandedly brought the opening back to respectability in modern play. After him Boris Spassky beat strong players with it, including Bobby Fischer, Zsuzsa Polgar, and a famous brilliancy against Bronstein himself. At club level, Gallagher’s book Winning with the King’s Gambit has proven extremely popular, implying that amateurs find the King’s Gambit attractive.
