The knights sacrifice opening?

Hello every one!

Sacrificing a knight early on seemed to put all of my opponents of guard today. (I even won against computer with this.) 

#2 Black

So what do you think about the fast sacrifice knight strategy?

Playable or not?

It is not ridiculous to sacrifice a knight on f7 for an advantage in development and a quick attack on the king. This happens in, for example, many lines of the King's Gambit. 

In this case, you sacrifice a knight but you get a pawn. So you are only losing 2 points. And you also make it difficult for the black king to get safe. The question is, would the advantage of having the black king being exposed equal or greater to the 2 points deficit you have?

I think not. I would much prefer black in this position (I am talking about the first position where white sacrifices the knight).

My reason is that if you get a developmental advantage (in exchange for loss of material) you have to take advantage of it quickly. If you do not then your opponent will unravel their pieces and reach a similar level of development; eventually you will just be left with a material deficit for nothing. In this case there is no easy way for white to attack the king. White has no pieces out. The black knight on f6 is strong. The h5-e8 diagonal is hard to attack. The black pawn on d5 is a good one. The bishop on c8 is ready to come out. But by contrast, white has nothing. So I am not even sure that in this position white has any developmental advantage (if anything, black is more developed because all white's moves have been with a piece that is now gone). So I just do not believe that white has anywhere close to sufficient compensation for the loss of material. I think it is a poor opening for white. 

I just looked at this game that you won. 

It is slightly different from the position you showed in your first diagram. In this game, black has played h6 and has a weakness along the h5-e8 diagonal (which you go on to exploit well). And black then sacrifices a knight on g2 (thus returning your material) for no apparent reason (maybe not to be outdone by your flamboyance!). 

I don't think the sacrifice was sound in this game but you won the game so well done.

Hi corum!

Thank you for your insight.

I agree that I was not to happy when I played a blunder move like the pawn e4-e5 but I still made the best out of it that I could in the situation looking more at what I could get out of it instead of looking at what I lost. The bad thing was that I had to move my king to f1 so it was like my opening backfired on me.  This game was not the best of examples to go over for this topic but we learn best from our mistakes.

I think the play style that would follow after the sacrifice should be fast and exploit anything you see to push for an advantage because it would take the other player more turns to get in to the corner.

Most of the times the other player will have to spend one move to get back to his starting position with the king letting white play more aggressive and maybe get to play a castling move for his own king.

I have yet to play more games with this strategy until I know what is good or bad.

I like attacking and taking the initiative so this maybe fits my play style.

Absolutely. It is a good idea to play in a way you can enjoy. If you were rated 2500+ then the first opening sequence you showed would be horrific and you would get slaughtered. But you are not rated so highly. 

Too many weaker players (let's say <1500) worry too much about playing grandmaster moves. They are often obsessed by playing the Sicilian as black for example. But when their opponent plays a move they did not expect they do not know what to do because they do not really understand the opening. Sometimes they even say that the reason they lost is that the opponent didn't play the opening properly which is the ultimate form of self denial.

Far better to play an opening that you understand and you enjoy. If you look at players such as Morphy and Anderssen in the 1800s they often played crazy sacrifices (a bit like yours) to great effect. Later, strong players learned how to reach equality (or better) against these sacrifices and so players stopped playing them. You would never see the line you posted in a GM game. But you are not playing GMs. You are playing people rated about 1100 which is much weaker than the players who succumbed to the attacking sacrifices in the 1800s and 1700s.  

So I would say, keep playing it!! As you get stronger, and start playing stronger players, you may need to rethink. But cross that bridge when you come to it.

I will take up the challenge and try to get as strong as I can with this.

Thank you.

Sorry to disappoint OP but both his sacrifices are meaningless and terrible. It is indeed ridiculous to sacrifice a knight without any advantage in development or whatever.

A historical example of good knight's sacrifice is Fried Liver:

Such sacrifices without any development are meaningful only in 3-check chess variant in order to deliver the first check!  

It's not an appropriate argument. Almost nothing would be easy against strong engines.

StupidGM identifies as Ray Gordon, a strong USCF player, and claims that chess is a video game now and it should be easy to get to 3000.

There is only one Ray Gordon in the USCF database. He played one tournament and ended up with a provisional rating of 640.

Draw your own conclusions.

LMAO I didn't know that video games existed so early in the human history!

im playing this too now, i went from 200 to 240 lol,  im improving everyday sorry

this is the queen's gambit declined knight scarifies checkmate