What Makes A Gambit Playable?

I would like to return to the articles on the Rousseau Gambit (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 f5!?) by Tim McGrew that I mentioned and linked to, a couple of posts previously - see "Something to Think About". McGrew's work is certainly worth reading for what he has to say about the Rousseau Gambit.

Just as important, however, in my opinion, is how he weaves into his analysis his personal examination of What makes a gambit playable? 

Of course, this question has come up regarding the Jerome Gambit (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.Bxf7+) as well, starting in the third week of this blog's existance. See "But – Is this stuff playable?? (Part I) & (Part II)".

Here is a teaser on McGrew's ideas

Gambits in Many Dimensions

I have been thinking a lot lately about a deceptively simple question: What makes a gambit playable? It is easy enough to give an answer that must be, abstractly, approximately correct: a gambit is playable if and only if it enables the gambiteer to win a reasonably high proportion of games, at least partly because of the merits of positions he gets with it out of the opening. But as soon as we start thinking about that answer we realize that it needs to be qualified to be of any practical use. It must enable the gambiteer to win more than his fair share of games against the people he needs to win against, the people against whom he scores in the 40-60% range with “ordinary” openings. And how can one tell, in advance, which openings are likely to do that?

Various books offer various schemes of evaluation. Notoriously, MCO, ECO and their various competitors evaluate positions onedimensionally: +-, +/-, +=, =, =+, -/+, -+. One would think that these evaluations would settle the issue, and they are enormously useful, but they are not the whole of the story and often do more to confuse amateurs – even strong amateurs – than to enlighten them. Part of the trouble is that we need to know why an evaluation is put on before we can see what it really means about a position; and though sometimes this is plain enough, at other times the rationale for those GM evaluations is maddeningly opaque. In the end, from a God’s-eye point of view, any chess position can be evaluated as 1-0, ½-½, or 0-1. So the seven evaluation symbols given above, if they are not just nonsense, must be conveying something more than the bare Objective Truth about the position. But what else is there, and why should it matter?

The truth, I think, is that playability is amulti-dimensional concept. Graham Burgess begins to indicate this in his wonderful little book 101 Chess Opening Surprises, where he rates each surprise not only for soundness but also for shock value. This is a good start, but there is much more to say...

For more information - and a link to a nice interview of Tim - you might want to check out the early blog post "A Few Words With... TimMcGrew".