The first gambit a beginner should learn and at which rating

i like the queens gambit

@WassimBerbar said in #1:

what's the most important gambit to learn and to use as a beginner to progress? And at which rating should you learn your first gambit?

Is there a list of openings/gambits classified from 600 to 2500 that you can learn from?
ig queens gambit is solid i am playing it since very beggining and playing it till now

I do not recommend a gambit for beginner. First you need to remember many moves and then play a lot of blitz games on daily basis to practice all that. I think a good idea is to start with gambits once you play over 1000 games and your rating is above 1500, but it's still very early. The amout of work to prepare even a simple gambit repertoire is insane.

Absolutely right. Playing gambits turns chess into a memory exercise. It's better to try to understand the game, play something vague, don't get sucked into being beat by someone else's pre-learnt variation.

Evans Gambit

Recommended by Bronstein for beginners. Used by Kasparov in serious games.

Scotch Gambit is easy to play for black if you follow the line from Larry Kaufman in his repertoire for black and white.

Against the Petroff try the Cochrane Gambit or the 5.Nc3-line according to your taste.

@TartakowerCK said in #26:

The opinion that gambits are a memory exercise is completely wrong. While I don't recommend complete beginners to play gambits because they haven't learnt basic tactics and checkmate patterns yet I would definitely recommend every player after mastering the basics to play gambit but instead of memorizing the variations you should try find moves yourself at the board. This of course leads to more time consumption in the beginning but if you play long time controls this shouldn't be a problem.

The reason why most players fail is that they choose these gambits and just memorize the moves instead of aquiring the skills to find those moves at the board. Any opening trap can be avoided by spotting the tactics and calculating the necessary forcing lines. Capablanca had to defend using his skills despite running into opening prep by Marshall. It's the chess skill you should focus on and not memorizing the variations.
This of course means that in the beginning you will find suboptimal moves and might get into tough situations but this is part of the learning process. Over time you get a better feeling for the positions. There is no need to know everything beforehand which is a misconception.
I play the Evans Gambit but I never sat there and memorized the variations which is a tedious and soulcrushing task. Instead, study games from strong players and try to pick up some typical attacking patterns/middlegame ideas rather than memorizing long variations. This applies to every other opening you learn.
The only difference between sharp opening and less sharp openings is that in the former your tactical/calculation skills are challenged to the max. Work on these areas really hard if you want to play gambits.

Hard disagree from me here unfortunately, with all due respect. A beginner should definitely play gambits, because it will teach them two things early in their chess development, time (not the clock but the value of a tempo) and how to use the initiative. Funny enough, if you look at the games of great players who were known for their solid chess, most of them were very aggressive players as kids and then learned to control that aggression as they got older. A young Karpov is a perfect example of this. It is way way easier to take someone who has developed their dynamic attacking chess and teach him some restraint as opposed to trying to teach someone who has stayed solid his whole career how to attack. Just don’t get too crazy with the choice of gambits. Stick to the classic ones that are fairly straight forward. Play 1.) e4, and play the King’s Gambit against e5... you’ll get a lot of wins as a beginner just piling up on f7. Play the Smith Morra against the Sicilian. Play the Benko against d4 and enjoy that persistent initiative Black gets if it is accepted. Study tactics as much as possible and start punishing your opponents. My point is that I believe there are far too many chess players who plateau way too early because they don’t know how to use the initiative. They read Silman and then just look for pawn weaknesses and what not, but as you get stronger you eventually need to push your opponent, as they aren’t just going to give you outposts and what not. Learn early on how to attack and you’ll go further in the long run, in my opinion.

#26 / #27 - I'm not sure that you two are actually disagreeing, except maybe over what's meant by "complete beginners"?

Anyway, I'd broadly agree too. If you play a "principled" gambit (rather than one that's just playing for cheap tricks) then you generally give up a pawn or two in exchange for good piece activity and an initiative. And since beginner games (and intermediate ones tbh) are mostly decided by tactics rather than tightly fought endgames, I'd back the beginner with better piece activity over the one with the extra pawn. And it shouldn't be about memorizing lines, just working out how to use your pieces and attack stuff, ie playing chess.

Why does "gambit" sound like a theme for openings. Why would it be structuring as a concept, to organize openings?

I guess I could scan all the posts and make some guesses, but if the thread were organized for this tangent question, how would it go. Trying to go from principle or global perspective to more specifics (my favorite initial angle, although it does not have to be one way all the time).

A gambit is per definition an opening theme.

It is categorized by a sacrifice that will lead to potential future advantages for the one playing it (most common: development or space advantage leading to attacking potential). Or it leads to complications and narrow and potentially unknown lines for the opponent.

This is why not all gambits are sound (e.g. the Stafford can be easily refuted with all natural moves by a 11xx player). Evan’s gambit, Scotch gambit, Queens gambit are Rock solid and there’s more that are harder to reach. Some are more dubious or coming from slightly unnatural lines but if you think about it any mid or end game sac is some kind of gambit tactic where you hope to accomplish something. It’s the essence of chess, unless you think that agreeing to a draw after 15 moves is exactly that.