The Chess Mind

First, we have Brian Wall offering this advice by e-mail:

I have been playing the Danish Gambit for 25-30 years.

I don't know why so many authors tell Black to chicken out with ... d5.

When I am Black I just take both pawns and play .. d6, ... c6, ... Nd7-c5 and ... Be6.

You have to endure a 25 move initiative but then you win.

And then, as if aware of Wall's comment, Larry Wolfley wrote to say the following:

I've had similar debates about the virtues of Capa's line against the Danish/goring gambit. One person argued that accepting the gambit was the only way to refute it, and no amount of logic could convince her otherwise.

Another point in favor of Capa's line is that we rarely face either the Danish or Goring gambit. So why spend time analysing other approaches, as Capa's easily equalizes for Black? It kills two birds with one stone too!

I've taken a similar approach to the Smith-Morra, 1.e4 c5 2.d4 cxd4 3.c3 Nf6. It's not the greatest approach, but trnsposing to the c3 Sicilian makes it one more opening I don't have to study for. When I have all my openings figured out, I'll come back to the Smith-Morra and come up with a better system. But, that will be in another lifetime I think.

Perhaps professional chess players need more options against these lines, but for most of us there isn't enough time for that.

Thanks for the great informative site to visit!

Larry

Let me start by saying that I'm not going to dissuade the maximalists among you. If you believe in taking gambit pawns, weathering the storm and winning the endgame, then more power to you.

However, unless one is constitutionally a maximalist, or one wants to engage in a personal growth project to develop one's defensive skills, I think there are excellent reasons to prefer the practical approach.

1. Psychological factors: Most people don't enjoy or excel playing on the defensive end, so it's psychologically more comfortable for Black to seize immediate, safe equality than to attempt fighting off the opponent's initiative for two dozen moves. Further, it's less pleasant for the typical gambiteer to find himself in an endgame.

2. Preparation, or the lack thereof: To fight off the tricky possibilities in the Danish and Goring Gambits, Black will have to (a) do some preparatory work and (b) regularly refresh her memory, as the opening doesn't appear too often in OTB play. The specialist with White will certainly have the upper hand here. With the Capablanca Defense, however, Black only needs to memorize 2-3 very straightforward lines. White will still have some preparation edge here, but it will be much less than in the accepted lines, and there are far fewer ways for Black to go significantly astray.

3. "Feel": Another problem with accepting the gambit once every year or two is that even if you've memorized the basic theory, you won't have a very good feel for the resulting positions. Meanwhile, your opponent is on his home turf, so even if you come out of the opening with theoretical equality, the practical situation favors him. Chess is more about know-how than know-that, and experience is the royal road to the former.

Finally, Brian Wall's (joking?) comment notwithstanding, I don't see any reason to think taking the pawn(s) is best from the God's-eye view. (Note that he's hardly a representative sample of the average Black player vs. the Danish/Goring, as he admits to having played the White side for 25-30 years. Of course he knows where the "dead bodies" are!) Black's percentages with 3...d5 are at least equal to those of 3...dxc3, and even the "oracle" (i.e. chess software) gives a very slight preference to 3...d5!

In sum, players are, as always, welcome to do what they will, but I think the Capablanca Defense isn't a cop-out, but a fine choice in its own right.

In a pair of responses to my previous post, on the Goring and Danish Gambits, M. Nieuweboer offered the following comments (here and here):

As I have been practioner of the Danish Gambit for about 10 years, I must disappoint you a bit. Capablanca's Defence is OK, of course. But the resulting endings are just dead equal. White's bad results are caused by not accepting this and by overambition.

The good news is, that there is a more promising and even easier variation. It also has the virtue of being rather unknown. Danish Dynamite only spends about half a page on it. It is 1.e4 e5 2.d4 exd4 3.c3 Ne7!? 4.cxd4 d5 or 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 exd4 4.c3 Nge7!? 5.cxd4/5.Bc4 d5. Black will be happy with x.exd5 Nxd5 and does not have to fear the advance e4-e5 either.

PS I have forgotten to mention the deviation 1.e4 e5 2.d4 exd4 3.c3 d5 4.exd5 Qxd5 5.cxd4 Nc6 6.Be3, which does not promise an advantage, but avoids that endgame. So Black players, who employ this line, might be in for a surprise.

M. Nieuweboer:

Thanks for supplying the further information! I hope readers will try the first line and be prepared for the second. It doesn't seem that Black has anything to fear after 6...Bb4+ 7. Nc3 Nf6 (or 7...Nge7) 8.Nf3 Qa5, but it's true: Black doesn't get to slide into an immediate ending.

I disagree with the implication of your first paragrah, however, which suggests that I claimed Black gets an edge with the Capablanca Defense. On the contrary, all three of my evaluative judgments expressed, either directly or indirectly, that the position was equal or balanced:

Black has a very simple, straightforward path to equality starting on move 3...

After 10.Qb3, Black is fine after 10...Qxb3 11.axb3 Nge7 12.Be3 O-O-O 13.O-O a6, when White's poor pawn structure is counterbalanced by the bishop pair...

So let's turn to the main line.... Black is fine here, too, and again we have a position where the better player will win...

That said, perhaps I should change my mind and affirm that Black is slightly better.

As I wrote in an old post, the evaluation of a "slight advantage" should be interpreted in either statistical or psychological terms or as a statement of the sides' relative margin of error. Thus if Goring and Danish players overextend or are frustrated by Black's sidestepping their gambit ambitions ("gambitions"? Maybe we can introduce a new set of terms into the chess lexicon, e.g. "gambitious": The Smith-Morra fan lost like a dog due to his overly gambitious play.), then practically speaking Black has an edge. It's not that the position is objectively better (which could only mean that one side is winning), but that Black has a larger margin of error (see below) or is psychologically happier (reasonably likely). So while Nieuweboer may be right that the problem is White players losing their marbles, this sort of "mental illness" may be sufficiently pervasive to justify an evaluation of =+.

But there is one final possibility: maybe Black's position really is easier to play. Maybe White's lousy score, based on a pretty healthy sample, indicates more than a tendency to overpress. Black's score in the average opening is around 44-45 percent, and that's starting with an equal-to-slightly worse position. It's therefore pretty remarkable that White only manages a miserable 40% from a "dead equal" position; as George Orwell might have said, some equal positions are more equal than others.