A couple of months ago in New Plans for the Channel, I’d intended to retire my Quick Wins series after 103 videos. However, I’ve come to the realisation that there is a place for a shorter and sharper video and article, that focuses on just a single lovely game! This has been especially the case as I’ve pivoted towards blitz from rapid. And so, dear reader, as my Adventures of a Chess Noob channel has just crossed 5,000 subscribers (🤩👍), I’m resurrecting the Quick Wins series from its hiatus, hallelujah!
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I’m very pleased that Quick Wins #104, the first game in the new series will be one of my all-time favourite lines with Black. It is a beautiful, Romantic response that often completely destroys White’s Ruy López Opening; the wonderful Jaenisch Gambit. 😏
I’ve been an advocate for the Jaenisch Gambit for some time, and at the time of this article, I’ve recorded almost thirty videos of Jaenisch Gambit games in a YouTube playlist. I’ve also an entire chapter in my book, Become a Chess Assassin on how to play (and refute) the Jaenisch Gambit.
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Attacking theme: h-file and kingside attack
As noted above, the Jaenisch Gambit is simply not something that is seen very frequently by Ruy López Opening players. The Lichess community database identifies that it is the eighth most common move from the position, representing only 2% of all Ruy López games.
An exploration: my opponent with the white pieces was statistically, a substantially stronger player than me. They’re rated in the ELO 1200s for blitz, and almost 1800 for rapid. I’ve only recently started blitz, but my peak ELO in rapid is around 1400. Analysing my opponent’s games on OpeningTree.com (check out my review on this powerful tool!), they were a committed Ruy López player, practically always playing it if Black permits an e4 e5 game. Of the 960 games of the Ruy López, my opponent had only encountered (3… f5) a total of 12 times (1.25%), and importantly they LOST two-thirds of the time!
Further, they had never encountered the specific line that was played, the Exchange Variation (4. Bxc6 dxc6 5. Nxe5) to which the prepared Jaenisch Gambit connoisseur must know the critical move (5… Qd4)! Why Qd4? 🤔 Because this move sets up a delicious trap! 🤩
Black’s queen seems to be giving a fork to White’s e4-pawn and somewhat over-extended e5-knight. White will most likely calculate that there seems to be no good way to hold onto the won material or avoid an unpleasant check after Qxe4+ with defensive moves. Stockfish’s recommendation of the most accurate move is rather inhuman: the backwards knight move (6. Nf3), which then allows (6… Qxe4+), which subsequently forces a queen trade where White must recapture with a bongcloud king (Kxe2). Surprisingly, this is equal! Instead, the most common response by White is the excellent appearing (6. Qh5+?), which is a mistake!
And this is one of the powers of the Jaenisch; better chess players will see a tactical attack which is usually good and only recognise a few turns later that it doesn’t work! In the position, Black wins 70% to White’s 27%. I blocked the check with (6… g6!); White gleefully and immediately took with (7. Nxg6), and then suddenly realised… Black’s h7-pawn is NOT pinned! 😱
Usually in this attack pattern, the h-pawn is pinned to the h-file rook, with the knight threatening a discovered check with (Nxh8), which then might even support the queen in a mating attack! Typically, this attack pattern would win a critical game-ending advantage. However, Black’s queen on d4 supports the long dark square diagonal, including the rook in the corner! After (7… hxg6), White’s queen is under attack by the h8-rook with the newly semi-opened h-file and must respond again.
The best move for White is to double down with (8. Qxg6+). Their queen is offside and there is a risk of it being trapped, but it’s the only good move in a bad situation. My opponent decided to play conservatively and pulled their queen back (8. Qe2?). This does seem logical (White is only down a single point of material) and is in fact the second most accurate move according to the engine. However, White is completely losing! The evaluation is around [-4] with Black having a win likelihood advantage of 78% vs White 18%.
The approach for Black is very simple if White succumbs to the pressure and castles kingside, to move their king out of the centre, which they did on turn 9. We make use of the semi-open h-file and attack the kingside! In this game, I played (9… Bd6), putting pressure on White’s h2-pawn with rook and bishop, and this forced them to react with (10. h3). This weakening of their kingside defence was then exploited two turns later with a bishop sacrifice, that very pleasingly was rated a brilliancy by the Chess.com analytic engine (11… Bxh3!!). ☺️
White attempted to counterattack, but (12… Qe5) was a simple move creating a bishop-queen battery threatening checkmate on h2! This forced White to push forward yet another kingside pawn (13. g3), but (13… Bg4) revealed now the fully open h-file along with an attack on White’s queen! The defences smashed; White had no good choices. They moved their queen (14. Qd2?) but after (14… Bf3), an imminent Rh1 checkmate was obvious. White resigned, good game, GG!
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The Jaenisch Gambit is a formidable weapon in blitz chess, that can be effective against even experienced players of the Ruy López Opening! Learn how to play the best chess opening attacks in the Romantic style with my new book, “Become a Chess Assassin!”, including the Jaenisch Gambit!
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Jaenisch Gambit chapter opening, from Become a Chess Assassin
The Ruy López Opening (1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5), also known as the Spanish Opening, is among the oldest of described openings and was included in the list of twelve chess openings in the Göttingen manuscript from c.1490. It is named after the Spanish priest Rodrigo “Ruy” López de Segura (c.1530-c.1580), who was the strongest player in Spain in the mid-sixteenth century. He published, Libro de la invencion liberal y arte del juego del axedrez (Book of the liberal invention and art of the game of chess) in 1561, one of the first books on modern chess. In his book, López made great contributions to opening theory, especially the King’s Gambit (1. e4 e5 2. f4).
However, one cannot but help to develop the view that López wasn’t quite sporting and was perhaps a rather petty man. The latter half of his book focussed on a mean-spirited critique of games in an earlier (and better known) book by Pedro Damiano (1480-1544) published in 1512, and it is here that the opening gains his name. López (wrongly) claimed that Damiano’s analysis that (2… Nc6) was the best response to the King’s Knight Opening was incorrect because White had (3. Bb5) as a response. The quality of many of López’s analyses are a bit suspect. Questionable too are his tips on chess strategy in the first part of his book, which included such dirty tricks, famously recorded for all posterity!
Place the board so that the sun is in your opponent’s eyes.
— Ruy López
It wasn’t until the publication of analyses of opening theory by Finnish/Russian Carl Friedrich von Jaenisch (1813-1872) that the Ruy López Opening gained its modern popularity. His book, written and published in French in 1842-3, was later translated to English and published in London in 1847 as Jaenisch’s Chess Preceptor: A New Analysis of the Openings of Games. Jaenisch was also the first to analyse and play the Romantic (3… f3) response to the Ruy López Opening, now named the Jaenisch Gambit. Although the opening is also commonly referred to as the Schliemann Defense, my view is that the Jaenisch Gambit is the more historically correct name.
The oldest recorded game of the Jaenisch Gambit in modern databases is (Bannerjee—Cochrane, 1850). This was another game in the extraordinary series played between chess masters Moheschunder Bannerjee and John Cochrane in Calcutta, previously mentioned in the chapters on the Budapest Gambit and the Tennison Gambit! Yet again we discover that the historic Indian chess tradition (which is largely missing in the Western narrative of chess) understood an opening that would not become popular in the West until much later. Bannerjee led with the Ruy López Opening, but Cochrane who was familiar with Jaenisch’s recently analysed gambit, now known to be one of the most effective responses in casual chess, defeated Bannerjee easily!
It is thus perhaps poetic that the namesakes of the Jaenisch Gambit and Ruy López Opening seem to have had opposing characters. On Jaenisch’s death, Howard Staunton (a protégé of Cochrane) mourned him and wrote the following words in a letter to their mutual friend, Baron von der Lasa:
… but for Jaenisch I entertained a particular affection, and his loss was proportionately painful to me. He was truly an amiable and upright man.
— Howard Staunton (1872)
Adventures of a Chess Noob 