Budapest Gambit - History

History

The first known game with the Budapest Gambit is Adler–Maróczy (played in Budapest in 1896). This game already featured some key aspects of the gambit, such as active play for the black pieces, and White making the typical mistake of moving the queen too early. As the player of the white pieces was not a strong player, the new opening went unnoticed apart from the local experts who had witnessed the game. The Hungarians István Abonyi, Zsigmond Barász and Gyula Breyer further developed the opening. Abonyi played it in 1916 against the Dutch surgeon Johannes Esser in a small tournament in Budapest. The Austrian player Josef Emil Krejcik played it against Helmer/Helmar in Vienna in 1917. Carl Schlechter published an optimistic analysis of the gambit in the Deutsche Schachzeitung.

The first use of the opening against a world-class player was at Berlin in April 1918, a double round-robin tournament with four players: Akiba Rubinstein, Carl Schlechter, Jacques Mieses and Milan Vidmar. Vidmar had to play Black in the first round against Rubinstein, then ranked the fourth best player in the world with a very positional style. At a loss for what to play, he sought advice from his friend Abonyi, who showed him the Budapest Gambit and the main ideas the Hungarian players had found. Vidmar followed Abonyi's advice and beat Rubinstein convincingly in just 24 moves. This victory so heartened Vidmar that he went on to win the tournament, while Rubinstein was so demoralised by this defeat that he lost another game against Mieses and drew a third one against Schlechter in the same opening.

After this tournament, the gambit finally began to be taken seriously. Top players like Savielly Tartakower and Siegbert Tarrasch started to play it. Schlechter published in 1918 the monograph Die budapester Verteidigung des Damengambits, which can be considered the first book on this opening. The gambit reached its peak of popularity (around five Budapest Gambits for every thousand games played) around 1920, so much so that many White players adopted the move-order 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 to avoid it.

The leading exponents of 1.d4 started to look for reliable antidotes. Alexander Alekhine showed how White could get a strong attack with 4.e4 in his games against Ilya Rabinovich (Baden-Baden 1925) and Adolf Seitz (Hastings 1925–26). But a few weeks later a theme tournament on the Budapest Gambit was held, in Budapest, and the result was 14½–21½ in Black's favor. Another tournament in Semmering the same year saw Alekhine losing to Karl Gilg in his pet line with White against the gambit, so that the e4-line had a mixed reputation. Meanwhile, more positional plans were also developed for White. Rubinstein showed how White could get a small positional advantage with 4.Bf4 Nc6 5.Nf3 Bb4+ 6.Nbd2, an assessment still valid today. The possibility 6.Nc3 was also considered attractive, as structural weaknesses were not valued as much as a material advantage of one pawn in those days. By the end of the 1920s, despite the invention of the highly original Fajarowicz variation 3...Ne4 in 1928, the Budapest Gambit was considered theoretically dubious.

This assessment was left unchanged for decades, as few players at the highest level used the Budapest Gambit and information about games from lesser players could not easily be found. During that time, various responses were developed against the 4.Bf4 line; these included 4...g5, invented by István Abonyi, further developed by the masters Bakonyi and Drimer. The master Kaposztas showed that even when White succeeded in his positional plan, it only meant for Black a worse endgame with drawish tendencies. Two pawn sacrifices were also introduced in the variation with 6.Nbd2 (still in the 4.Bf4 line), based on pawn pushes d7–d6 or f7–f6 and a quick attack against b2.

The Budapest Gambit saw a short-lived revival in 1984–85 when a Chess Informant included three games (as many as in the previous fifteen years), all played at a high level of competition, and all won by Black. But White players found reinforcements and even invented a line with 4.e3 and 5.Nh3. In the 21st century, despite Shakhriyar Mamedyarov's successful efforts to rehabilitate the line 4.Bf4 g5, the Budapest Gambit almost never appears at the highest level.