Published 6/13/24
Hello everyone! Today I will be sharing a very interesting and aggressive sideline against the Dutch opening. The Dutch can be an annoying opening to play against, especially the Stonewall setups that are difficult to exploit. What’s interesting about this particular gambit is that the computer still gives a slight advantage for white in the variations, which is very unusual for these types of quirky gambits.
General position of the sideline:
As you can see, we enter the sideline as early as move 2! It’s not very often that you can surprise your opponent and make them start thinking on move 2. Typically it’s not a great idea to bring your queen out this early in the opening stage, but this line is a special exception to that rule. As you’ll see in the analyses below, the queen is going to play an important role in pressuring the b1-h7 diagonal. What’s nice about this line is that the queen is attacking the f5 pawn which means that black doesn’t have that many options in response to Qd3. Therefore, it’s not hard to prepare this line with the white pieces.
Let’s take a look at some of the most critical lines in response to 2.Qd3:
There are variations where we play relatively normal chess, but most of the variations lead to pure chaos and the player with the black pieces can end up in a lot of trouble very quickly if they do not know what they are doing. While some of the lines where we sacrifice the g-pawn provide close to no advantage for white, it’s very unlikely that your opponent will find all of the correct moves to keep equality.
Let’s take a look at some model games between strong players that played this sideline:
It is worth noting that Abergel had a very comfortable position after the opening stage, with a close to +1.5 advantage at certain moments.
Overall, this is definitely an interesting weapon to consider adding to your repertoire if you are struggling to find a good line against the Dutch, or simply want to surprise your opponents and enter messy positions.
Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed the article! If you have any suggestions on what I should write about in future articles, let me know in the comments.
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Have a great day 🙂