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Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Portuguese Opening

     During the past several days I have been playing a lot of 10 minute games on the Internet, mostly experimenting with any weird, unusual opening that I could think of. Two seem to have worked out surprisingly well: 

1) Latvian Gambit (or Greco Counter Gambit as I knew it way back when)1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 f5 
2) Portuguese Opening 1. e4 e5 2. Bb5 
     
     IM Andrew Martin actually did a Foxy DVD on the Portuguese and the hype says you can “look forward to the wicked Portuguese Gambit or a super-charged King’s Gambit position. A shock opening that is eminently playable...” 
     Graham Burgess says it’s an opening that looks like a Ruy Lopez except white forgot to play 2.Nf3...it’s not as bad or nonsensical as it appears and black must proceed carefully. 

Based on the scant theory available there are three basic lines: 
Main Line: 2…c6 3.Ba4 
Portuguese Gambit: 2…Nf6 3.d4!? 
Other: 2…a6, 2…Nc6, 2…Qg5 and 2…Bc5 

     The idea is that by delaying Nf3, white leaves the f-pawn free to move and retains the possibility of playing f2–f4. The trade-off is that white's lack of pressure on e5 leaves Black with a freer hand. Blah...blah...blah. That’s theoretical stuff that perhaps nobody but GMs care about, but then a GM would never play the Portuguese. 
     Whenever I’ve played it online my opponents seem to get flummoxed. I don’t know why it is but many of them seem to think that there must be an immediate, crushing refutation (there isn’t) and the refutation requires violating sound opening principles and strategy. Some of them also seem to think that an opponent who plays such a silly move as 2.Bb5 is also going to be a pushover and fall for crude, sloppy tactical refutations. All the wrong reactions. 
     While I’ve had pretty good luck with the Portuguese, it’s been mostly because of...good luck! All it takes is a look at Chess Tempo's report  on the opening to see that in the long run white does not do well if black plays 2...c6 or 2...Nf6. It’s fun, but play it at your own risk!


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