let's flip the board and let's let's get a
let's get a repertoire with the black pieces yeah yes please so you've been playing you've
been playing different things so for example oh wow you had a lot of games with the white pieces
i'm going to invite you to another board sure okay invite selected all right flip it so that
we have black this whoa so you played e4 e5 and you played f5 whoa where did you get this
inspiration um i'll be honest i don't remember you just came up with this i think i i think
my plan was to um to go here and then i'd be able to recapture uh it's yes actually yes very
much yes so uh you just got to be a little bit careful in the beginning of the game playing
this aggressively can backfire so for example there's different situations where white can just
like because they have a lead in development they just lash out with a move like that and it can
be really scary if you play this wrong uh because what will happen is you'll just get pieces flying
at you from all directions uh but this is a very good idea so the the biggest thing that a lot of
beginners struggle with when they start out is that playing e4 e5 as black sucks because you
don't get the advantage of the first move and all the same pressure that you learn to apply
with white you now have to deal with with black you know so your options then are after knight
f3 well first of all your options are not to play e5 but there's nothing wrong inherently
with e5 uh a way to open up the position very quickly with the black pieces have you
you know about the scandinavian defense with d5 yeah so i will give this as an option to you if
you'd like to mess around with it it'll be just brief essentially if i leave my pawn
here you will take it and if i take you you will bring your queen out which is
fine so go ahead bring your queen out and essentially the rule is
this if i attack your queen you move it to the side of the board so if i
attack it on my next move for example knight c3 move the queen to the side and then
just develop and castle queen side so something like there is some knight
c6 positions bishop f5 bishop g4 this is you know completely reasonable and okay variation
and it will give you easy games because what it will do is it'll castle your king and you remember
last time i explained the philosophy of playing an opening with black you're getting into a small
subcategory of what white has seen before right that's sort of the point because when white
plays e4 white has seen e5 90 of the time yeah so you play d5 takes takes i can attack
your queen you bring the queen here and just so it has a getaway path back this way you can play like something like like like this
for example so watch i play develop my bishop develop your knight and then you will
bring this bishop out to one of these two squares let's say i play knight f3
you can choose i will let you choose for the bishop yeah you can choose either or i
think this is this is what i've what i've been doing i like it and by the way you're happy
to trade because what's going to happen is you'll replace your pawns on light squares you
understand that like you trade your light squared bishop so you restructure on the light squares uh
because you don't have a light sweat guard okay i have not heard that before okay okay so so you're
you're okay trading this even though that get that brings out the queen yeah it's it's not not the
worst thing in the world so you just need to be a little bit careful in scandinavian with something
like this so you should develop your pawn here or if you're feeling fancy or
night the reason i like the pawn your queen always has a way home otherwise some
people put the knight their queen gets stuck so c6 is perfectly fine something like this by
castle you can play e6 better than e5 why why is this better to be on this square well
it's not this pawn isn't uh isn't defended here there's a defender here it's defended
with a queen but it's it's yeah you're right it's a little loose could be very
easy target for the rook for example so yes e6 is better notice that
you're blocking out this guy um bishop yes yes exactly okay and then you'd
bring out your knight and you can either castle queenside if you'd like to start some sort
of big attack on this side of the board or you can castle short and you're fine and you
have a longer game so this is a more open board why is it open there's really very few pawns in
the center which means that the pieces are taking control of the center fighting for positioning and
so on uh scandinavian is is very simple it's it's quite literally if they take if they attack you
move there if they don't attack quick development quick development with your pieces and queenside
castle like you can learn it within two minutes then you build your experience somebody
said what if white doesn't take on d5 so obviously if white pushes you want
to play e6 to then develop your bishop but then you would lock in this guy so
you should probably play bishop five okay so oh i see so so play it first and then
and then bring this out so that yes your bishop isn't locked in yes and another common
idea so you could go ahead play bishop f5 which that which does happen um
if you play this in this position uh the only drawback obviously is
you don't get this natural move yeah which is fine that is one of the
one of the i guess byproducts of this so if d4 what you're gonna try to do
is use a pawn break to chip away at the center you'll try to play this you can't
right now because it's free you play this oh and now that's not free okay i'm gonna show
you one more concept so play c5 we're gonna kind of get get through this entire thought
process uh bishop b5 is not a scary check you just block nothing complicated about that okay
block it uh the toughest thing in this position is the development of this knight because again
you you can't go here and in a perfect world you would play f6 and they would take you and they
would help you right but that's not gonna happen so what do you do in an imperfect world yes in an
imperfect world in an imperfect world we have to take a couple moves to develop this night so what
we'll do is we'll go here and oftentimes we'll either go this way or we even bring the knight
back that way so we can develop our bishop and castle and then we slowly expand on the queen
side so what does that mean expand on the queen side it means bring our pawns out use our space
advantage where do we have the most space here because white controls this we can't really
develop easily and so that's kind of the way we do it if i gave you two more moves to increase
your pressure on that pawn what would you do so you've got pressure here make another
move that hits this pawn this one right this attacks the pawn and then yep you want
two moves no knight c6 is a good start i like it i like it and then if some so now
you have two things hitting this pawn and if i do this in a lot of positions here you
can bring the queen oops sorry you can bring the queen more pressure okay now let's think about
it like this this is going to be your your target so you've got one hit here two guards
oftentimes you'll use this bishop move it one more time and remove the
defender let's just play bishop g4 it's like well hold on a second i don't understand
what that why why is this move so useful i i already developed some of my pieces so how can
that move possibly be useful remember this night if we go night here how can that
knight also add pressure to this pawn uh it can go up here yes so our position is
very closed which allows us more maneuvering we can move the bishop out of
the way put the knight there take this knight and now white
loses the defender of the center okay so e5 is an annoying move in the scandinavian oops
sorry e5 is a little bit of an annoying move what we do is we offset that by slowly building
up the position with e6 c5 knight c6 and so on and we're really going to go for this
d4 pawn so and somebody says is it a bad idea to develop the bishop to g4 at the
start yes because you'll lose the bishop um so you in this in this position you don't
have a move that maximizes your flexibility do you understand what i'm saying like if you play
this you're that's it you killed your option to go bishop f5 if you play knight c6 you can't go
c5 anymore so the only thing that you can play is this move that is the only move that maintains
because you're going to play this anyway right yeah i'm going to play c5 anyway then
you'll play knight c6 so for example if i play knight f3 now you can just skip it
you can go directly to pinning this knight okay if you'd like to right so we can develop
these pieces but i'm just trying to show you the the structure that could arise um if they they
don't take if they just push now some people i've seen do this because they pre-move it then they
just lose a pawn so that is you know that that is a tragic some you know that's a tragic thing
that can happen uh if they do this you take and by the way didn't we just look at a queenless uh
position yeah so this is nothing you're afraid of okay do you like you like the the trading
the queens if it gives you the yes kills the castling rights yes it doesn't it's not like
you're winning but there's no reason not to do it because now you have all the advantages in the
position it's like you're playing white okay so i've also seen this which is kind
of funny i'll show this to you just one more thing knight c3 you can take you can put your queen out because
what's the worst thing that can happen they just go back right
it's the exact same position oops so it's basically as if it was takes
takes here except we included two more moves so where would you go from here you'd
go to the side again queen to the side and and and and continue with the seepawn move the
bishop out knight try to queenside castle somebody also asked me and this is actually very common
this might this might make you laugh this is a pretty common move in these positions because
from from here your queen is no longer a target and sometimes people feel more safer treating
this way and then just developing normally um if the question is why would you play this like why would you lose a move in the beginning of
the game with your queen compared to just a normal kingspawn position right like why in this point
and this one you get something totally different it's because these positions that arise
after the king's pawn meet you're relying on on whatever white does now you need to respond
with but when you enter this sort of territory the structure of the position is different it's
a completely open board so there's like i told you already there's nothing in the center and
your pieces are free to go wherever they want you can castle which way you want etc etc so
the nature of the position is much more open than it is in an e4 e5 game uh your scotch
that you play with d4 you're trying to get an open game that's what you're trying to do but
because you have the advantage of the first move you don't actually your queen isn't the
target in the center if that makes sense so that's one of the reasons i i like
the scandinavian as one weapon now i also wanted to give you just within e4 e5
itself some options so if knight f3 you know your your most flexible second move is always
going to be knight c6 uh but there is another very tricky system you can investigate uh called
the stafford gambit have you ever heard of that uh i think i remember you at one
point explaining it to me is that is that this one no that's the latvian gambit
yeah um so ladviana the way you play it is very well with this f5 it's very aggressive but it can
backfire very quickly and i don't want to give you you know uh some absolute garbage
which will work one times out of ten okay fair enough yeah so uh the stafford gambit
then yes stafford gambit is by far more legitimate uh and essentially the only thing is it's not
guaranteed essentially you copy and they have to take they have to take if they don't
take if they just go here you got to go back to your your regular stuff like okay it's
just four nights so that's the only drawback but if they do take your pawn you play knight c6
so go ahead play knight c6 okay sure so first of all do you do you know what a gambit is it's
a good good starting point what is the gambit uh i always thought that a gambit meant a
sacrifice that he always thought correctly okay a gambit is when early on you sacrifice a pawn
two pawns sometimes more and you get some sort of a big attack on your opponent uh it's easier
to do with white because you have the advantage of the first move when you play gambits
with black very often they are very bad they're like if if white plays like a computer
white should win okay now if you get somebody who plays like a computer you report them they
get banned most likely um you know but uh at the highest of levels it's like some grand
masters they they can't afford to play gambits because they will simply run into trouble but in
this position you now have you kind of have like the open lines here yeah uh you also by the way do
you understand why you would take with the d-pawn and not with the b-pawn um do you like freeing
up this lane for the queen i like freeing up the lane i also like opening up the light
squared bishop oh fair enough yeah so that's so first things first what happens if white
plays e5 just attacks your knight okay uh i'd run away and go maybe here so knight
c5 is okay uh there's there's there's very very dangerous uh approaches to the position as
well like you can play for example uh knight g4 and what essentially what you're going for
with knight g4 is that if white plays two passively something like queenie two that's what
you're looking at how do you attack that pawn a second time this yeah and
by the you're just winning okay like you're you're
literally winning on the spot how do you figure so what do you mean there's no way there's no way to guard
that yep there's just no way to guard this oh yep okay yeah that's it just gg you
take so for instance h3 check this out take on f2 would check king
d1 check again can't take you oh my that that is dirty yeah and then they gotta
lose their queen they gotta lose their queen and that's it you're just the queen so that's pretty
cool yeah so there's you know there there is this the drawback of knight g4 is that again
if white knows what they're doing there's this that is the best move uh but and if you
can get really aggressive here like queen h4 but again if white just kind of plays solid
that's not gonna work okay that's not gonna work but it you do have that option knight d5 is
is the most is the more stable more stable move uh knight e4 doesn't really attack anything
and d4 is still considered the best move here uh so i i don't really i don't like this because there's a little bit less of a trap like for
instance d3 it's all traps you still go bishop c5 really yeah because if takes
whoops teleported if takes oops um and you lose the queen again oh okay
but yeah okay there's so many ways to to get the queen from yes and how do you
win how do you win the queen if this happens hmm this one yeah gg so you can win you can
win ver there's a lot of traps uh they they have to stabilize the center with d4 they
can't go chasing you somebody said what if f3 again queen h4 these three moves are
going to be your bread and butter and by the way i think bishop c5 is
winning here as well because of this so first of all they can literally
walk into mate which would be nice oh yikes yeah imagine winning
like this in eight moves uh i wanna i wanna see this in the future uh
i do i really wanna try this now because this is an opening i at least saw a fair bit of as
opposed to the the uh uh fried liver yeah you can you can also not move your knight at all and
play queen e7 uh pinning the pawn now if white plays something like queen e2 you do have to move
your knight you at this point have no more choice but this is protecting everything now if you don't
want to do anything insane and just play knight d5 your goal here is going to be and chasing you
is not going to be very good uh again aggressive gambit style night before trying to jump in here
yeah look at this so again remember this d4 thing yeah you could just take that because if this what happens uh this one uh-huh you win the pawn back you
win this you short you long castle life is good i mean you get the bishop out and so on so
uh yeah so this is a very venomous opening the problem is that it doesn't it doesn't have to
happen you know yeah and then it kind of loses to just bringing this one out whenever you start
going on your attack yeah you you but but again up until a certain level that might not be well
known so white will always have the advantage but just because an opening is is bad doesn't mean
that uh it's not incredibly fun and you can still win a lot of games in it so uh the only
thing is that computers take the fun out of it because back before we knew that certain openings
were solved certain gambits were very fun uh so the the stafford gambit is extremely oops sorry
it's extremely dangerous but its drawback is yes if they consolidate the right way uh then we also
only looked at e5 so if they play something like knight c3 remember this move yeah all right so
again bishop c5 with ideas to come here queen d4 bishop g4 knight g4 all these different attacking
possibilities you got to think about you can't just like sacrifice upon early and say all right
well i you know now i'm going to play solid we're going straight for mate like that's literally
what we're going for let's try to crush okay uh but castle you'll be down upon and let me just
tell you one more thing the engine will hate it so it'll yell at me and say blunder blunder yes
it's gonna say this is a bad move and so on and so forth but that's like you don't that's one of the
drawbacks of actually engine analysis early on is folks don't quite understand and when
you take them out of their comfort zone they've got to think on their
own it's not so simple to do that um so we looked at obviously if you get attacked
if the knight comes out these are the most common if this comes out again still bishop c5 is
good uh bishop g4 and try to castle quickly and always looking at sacrifices for
example already here remember this and deflecting the king away from the queen oh right so like this is uh this is really vicious
man it's there's there's a lot of venom to it but i also did want to give you a standard way of
playing to to throw in this f5 thing that you like to play uh because it's it's actually a legitimate
weapon it's it's not bad at all uh i like it a lot i actually just had a game entitled tuesday
that i played which is this tournament that happens once a week a lot a lot of strong players
it didn't it didn't start with the king's pawn let me just clear this all up for us it didn't start
with the king's pawn but it quickly became a king spawn position so it started out like this d3
knight c6 and you see how now it's king spawn yeah yeah so he played knight
c3 and i played bishop b4 and this is literally what you did to that other
player yeah up here castle so if you want to play like this you're more than welcome to
but you notice how the bishop is not here yeah it's locked in there yeah so it's a little
more dangerous to do this but this is the better move in this case than bishop here because you
need to destabilize the center that's the point you need to take this when you have a chance like
for example this you're taking and then you're just going to replace your pawn because now white
loses an important protector of the center yeah and you develop yep and then you get your active
line so for example i just had a game that went like that but e4 e5 knight f3 knight c6 let's
say bishop c4 so against this you're gonna have some difficulties uh getting this sort of
thing f5 but if you play for instance bishop c5 remember last time i showed
you this pawn expansion um i don't remember that i'll be honest no it's
okay it also is is mirrored uh it's essentially like you can't play into the fried liver
like you can't play into the fried liver yeah well i'm actually going to show you
now a weapon against the fried liver are you ready yes so you're going to play knight
f6 as if you're playing stupid so let's say they enter it now again if they just play solid they
just want to develop their pieces early on in the game they don't want to uh challenge you based
on your setup like i said you know they're just calmly moving what i recommend if you want to
start attacking them go for a queen side castle so what that looks like is you'll
play h6 early so for instance h6 because what does that prevent a fried liver it
prevents anything from coming to g5 so it prevents the fried liver and in the future it also prevents
me from pinning you oh yeah so early h6 by black then you develop normally do you know what
else this is gonna do once you castle this way you're gonna play g5 you're gonna go for some
crazy stuff okay so you're gonna start your own pawn attack on their castled king while you
go the other way so if you cancel the other way it would look how would you you know prepare
your development to try to castle queenside um i'd probably bring this up and bring
this out it's a little better to do it like this with d6 i'll show you why
in a second okay so d6 go ahead d6 um some people will offer you this trade now
what i'm about to show you is that you don't want to take because what are you doing you're
just opening up their rook for the future okay instead you see this slide back why not just leave it there because it's
it's protected still yes it's a it's a small concept but very important to
remember it's about pawn structure this way your pawns stay together even though you're doubling these pawns they're
staying together the center is protected and they kind of control this area
of the board if you were to leave the bishop there and just develop this guy
and what happens is you double your pawns and to defend this pawn you need to push this
pawn okay so just like and if you push this pawn where do you lose stability four
dark squared pawns something's weak uh yeah now they can mess me up with their
light square bishop yeah so this structure isn't losing by any stretch of the imagination
but it's a little bit less stable than if you just slide the bishop back slide the bishop back a
square be like dude you can take me i'm good like i'm not going to i'm not going to be opening
the position for you uh you want that to happen so something like this now we bring this
and we try to long castle so queen up and then try to castle queenside i'm just
making you know basic improving moves for whites etc etc ow is when you have your funds so if
you don't necessarily get your crazy gambit what you do is you get opposite side
castling and you don't have to play these boring same side castling maneuvering games
that you don't really know where to do and et cetera et cetera here the game plan is
very simple destroy them just destroy them go
