Smith-Morra Gambit dangers - strange 5.f4 move early on :)

Hi all

I had a great deal of fun playing a sideline variation of the Sicilian defense which many IM's and GMs do not regularly play. But it has been a popular opening for ordinary club players and enthusiasts for many years. It is especially dangerous at faster time controls and even World top 10 player Alireza Firouzja has been using it with great success at extreme bullet time controls with success here at lichess. Not only that but a major popular regular streamer IM Marc Esserman uses it frequently here at lichess with huge success.

I used to play on the ICC autopairing back in the day before lichess, and here is one of my 5-minute auto-pairing games vs a British IM Richard Pert using the Smith-Morra Gambit, which I originally called the "Morra-Smith" gambit :-

I played the innovative f4 which is certainly not a book move. But a fast time controls, if experienced players need to improvise heavily, the results can be completely disastrous.

Later with Bd2 the bishop has potentially got access to the a3-f8 diagonal:

When black plays Ng4 which seems very tempting, it does have a "weakness of the last move" in allowing ne4, and this facilitates the Bb4 check potentially:

OUCH!:

Final position Checkmate!

Here is my ancient ICC video commentary of what happened:

https://youtu.be/mukBgW-D85c

(Here is my Smith-Morra playlist: https://kingscrusher.tv/smithmorra )

Annoying Opening Theorists is a great advantage!

The Smith-Morra has the advantage of kind of annoying Sicilian defense theorists because you are not letting them use their hard-earned memorized variations and general preparation. All of those weekends, when you went to the cinema and has a social life - they were preparing one of several different Sicilian variations such as:

• The Najdorf
• The Scheveningen
• The Dragon
• The Svenshnikov
• The Accelerated Dragon
• The Taimanov
• The Kan variation
• etc

As Grandmaster Daniel King has put it:

"Having spent alarmingly large chunks of my life studying the white side of the Open Sicilian, I find myself asking, why did I bother?" - Grandmaster Daniel King

BTW I once did a dual commentary video with Daniel King here where he went over some amazing Sicilian Najdorf games :

https://youtu.be/kIAtBqJB_p4

c’est la vie

While you were going out to Nando's first en route to a cinema booking, they were studying these variations. And then they need to revise them for fear of forgetting critical lines. Then they play some muppet online who bypasses all that work - all that energy - all that preparation - all that life force. They play a silly gambit - and they don't even follow it up correctly. f4 needed to be punished by all accounts, except Black got checkmate quickly.

c'est la vie indeed!

The downside of the Smith-Morra Gambit

One's preparation cannot be based purely on GM games playing it, as many GMs will not dare play this gambit in one-day time controls. However, if you look carefully there have been World top 10 players like Alireza Firouzja using it in bullet chess. If you take these seriously you might discover that actually, the moves survive the engine test in many cases! In which case, just because the GMs don't play the Gambit regularly in longer time controls doesn't mean it is entirely terrible!

A special mention has to go to IM Marc Esserman who does have the balls to play it in serious games and even drew with Vishy Anand here and was slightly better in the final position:

Vishy Anand "chickened out" with a decline variation - and here is where knowledge of the 2.c3 Alapin variation can really be handy. It is good to look at Alapin exponents such as Vajda for key insights :)

The final position of Esserman vs Vishy Anand

Takeaway points

• The biggest risk of you spending time learning and memorizing theory is that it won't turn up!
• The second biggest risk of studying theory is that it comes up rarely like 1 in 50 games
• The third biggest risk of studying theory is that you memorized just the start moves - and not the follow-up plans! It is good to have some "model games" in mind when learning opening theory, so you can have an idea of follow-up moves and plans later. It also helps determine the "Why" of the early moves to at least some evidential follow up why earlier moves were indeed important or not.

Hope you enjoyed this blog :). Any likes and follows are really appreciated. Also, I also have some interesting chess courses at https://kingscrusher.tv/chesscourses to check out.

Cheers, K