the budapest is okay. go for it!
it's not unsound and you can still play it against people who know what they are doing, though then white has a slightly bigger theoretical edge than usual which shouldn't actually matter that much.
when over 50% of your opponents don't actually know what they are doing (like i feel that's the case at your level), that's a nice bonus.
my main issue with having the budapest as a main staple of your repertoire is 2 Nf3.
For 2. Nf3 what I've been doing is playing g6 and franchiettoing my bishop and going into a King's Indian type of thing. For open Sicilian games I always went into the Dragon variation and I feel the King's Indian is similar, though I prefer when I can play the Budapest instead.
Am I right in thinking the Budapest is less theoretical and analyzed? From what I know the Sicilian became popular because GMs like Fischer and Kasparov started using it, and people wanted to be like them. And after Magnus Carlsen started playing the Dragon recently, the Dragon surged in popularity. But none of the GMs play the Budapest that much so noone wants to learn it, therefore there is much less theory. I doubt you'd ever be able to walk into a Barnes & Noble and find whole books about how to defeat the Budapest like you can with the Sicilian.
Mashanator, when you say "the better you get, the worse the Budapest becomes" do you think you might just be giving up on the opening?
Like when I first started using it I was losing a lot and I began to think "people are right, this opening sucks" but I kept using it anyway and got the hang of it. Maybe it's not so much the better you get the worse it becomes, but that you just have to put more effort into studying the opening as your level of opposition rises, and not give up on the opening.
After all, Milan Vidmar beat Akiba Rubenstien with this. If Rubenstien can be beat with it, then anyone can.
so what if white plays 2 Nf3 3 c4? were you just tricked into a main line king's indian?
i like your approach of trying to stay "fine but out of fashion", but it's not easy to find the openings that you like, though it's definitely possible. :P
of course the budapest is less theoretical and analyzed - it's not a super sharp line, and it never having been in fashion makes it so that massive theory wasn't really ever developed for it.
The main problem with the budapest is that black's pawn structure is passive (center with only d6) white the black pawn center is actice (c4 and often the possibility to play e4/f4 depending on whites plan).
This is somewhat compensated by active pieces (specialy in the Bf4 variations) but in general the active pieces are more temporarly than the passive pawn structure (against a player who knows how to avoid common budapest traps like a5/Ra6/Rh6).
In short white can choose where he plays (kingside attack/queenside etc) while black has to wait and react and has a hard time creating counterplay
Though i think that objectively Bf4 gives an advantage against the budapest gambit i personally play Nf3 for the reason descriped below. Black will get his pawn back but the remaining position is passive. Not many budapest gambit players are happy to defend a slightly passive position against a experienced d4 positional player.
moonnie wrote a nice post.
all in all, you have to consider the whole balance - how happy are you with the positions in the main lines, and how likely your average opponent is to go into them? are you also okay in the "scrub variations"?
if you aren't satisfied with the main lines (or they are "busted"), then you probably shouldn't play the opening.
the budapest isn't "busted", but is it worth learning when you can only get it after d4 c4 and the positions you get from it likely can't relate too much to the rest of your repertoire?
it's a bit ironic that i rejected the budapest for myself for practical reasons (these above). :P
I actually prefer the Albin rather than the budapest gambit. Anyway it's nice to know some gambits to surprise your opponents but generally when starting it's wise to study and play the main lines. A sound and solid opening reportoire will go a long way even against higher rated and experience opponents but gambits will be most likely be refuted outright and then your at a lose what to do after.
I think that playing gambits, especially in blitz, can help you win games that others might resign. You learn that the initiative is very important and that tempi can be vital in some positions. I disagree that the Benko Gambit is superior to the Budapest. I have played it for years and find the Budapest to really catch the below 1800 players off guard; not nearly as common to catch people off guard in the Benko. I do agree in learning something about many openings, but the Budapest is a good arrow in your quiver of openings! Take a look at GM Williams video on the Budapest. I did and have won a nice turn based game and two 10 minute games in my first three games using it!
A lot of players do play 2. Nf3 also to avoid the Nimzo-Indian. In addition to playing the KID as an option, you may also want to try out the QID or Benoni when 2. Nf3 is played against you.
Further to chessmicky's point - the OP started with this intriguing comment:
<<....up until recently I would only play as black against 1. e4 because I was trying to learn the Sicilian. >>
How do you 'only play black against 1.e4' - ? How do (or did) you control your opponent's first move, and get them to always play 1.e4? Or should this be interpreted differently - i.e., that you would abandon the game immediately if they played something other than 1.e4?
This seems either illogical or terrible sportsmanship (in that interpretation). Can you elaborate and explain? Thanks.
I think you'll find that you can rarsly substitute the Budapest Gambit for the Sicilian. After 1.e4 it's pretty hard to get to the Budapest!
Really ? I get it all the time by transposition : 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nf6...
Though for some reason, people in my club call it the 'Eastern Budapest'.
ya
Depends on the time control. G/30 and lower, you can try more risky stuff than in standard time controls.
I've evolved my evaluation of the Budapest over time. On its own, I think it's more or less playable. It is not "refuted" or "terrible" or any of those other words that people might be tempted to use. Sure, certain lines might be, but didn't everybody notice Ivanchuk's game against Aronian from the Candidates?
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1713630
I think the problem with it, if you want to call it that, is that it is not as reliable a path to equality as the Nimzo-Indian, or the QGD. But this is not a problem at all at the club level.
One problem I can see at the club level is that it really requires white to play 2.c4 to go into the Budapest. And yeah sure, many white players do that, but maybe it's half of them? Two thirds? So you'll always have to prepare something else. For non-professional players, it's generally a good idea to save time on opening preparation, so this could be an issue.
Another problem I can see is that it might not expose you to certain types of positions. But this also isn't as big a deal. For example, I don't play 1.e4, and I don't play 1...e5 against e4, so I never encounter the Ruy Lopez in my games. And talk about a rich opening - that one takes the cake. And so I have exactly this problem in my chess, and it hasn't held me back (so far).
Hey guys, this is me, AdorableMogwai, under my new account. I closed AdorableMogwai some time ago after a losing streak in blitz. (I no longer play blitz games whatsoever)
I have improved over 300 points since this post was written, it is quite funny for me to see these threads get bumped and see all the things I wrote back then when I was so new to chess.
I am still using the Budapest with success against equal and greater opposition, even using it to get my sole victory over my highest rated chess friend who was rated almost 400 points higher than me at the time. I have played about 15 games with him (using various openings) and this is the only one I won. Don't take my word for it though, you can see from my lichess account SeaTurtle that I have played 19 games in the Budapest and have a score of 10 wins 2 draws and 7 losses. That's a nearly 60% win rate playing as Black. Oh, once the Budapest was declined with d5 (this happens less often the better opposition I face) and I won that game too, though that game is lost somewhere under another opening classification like "Indian game".
My Budapest record since starting my SeaTurtle account at Lichess:
http://en.lichess.org/games/search?players.a=&players.b=Seaturtle&players.winner=&ratingMin=&ratingMax=&hasAi=&aiLevelMin=&aiLevelMax=&variant=&mode=&opening=A52&turnsMin=&turnsMax=&durationMin=&durationMax=&status=&dateMin=&dateMax=&sort.field=d&sort.order=desc
Here is the game where I beat the highest rated opponent >2000 I've beaten so far in my life using the Budapest gambit.
http://en.lichess.org/XR7eqzeO/black
Also two of the seven losses in the Budapest came against him so I don't know if they can really be counted as losses considering the rating differential.
I completely disagree with Mashanator, I'm actually finding the opposite, the better at chess I get the better the Budapest becomes.
@TPGriffin76, I was playing only as Black at Lichess where you can choose your color. Yes when I first began playing I was aborting games when d4 was played, and yes it was bad sportsmanship and I don't do that anymore.
As one final thing to add to the original post, I'm having more success against the anti-sicilians too now that I've learned more about them. I'd say I no longer think the Budapest is better than the Sicilian, but that they're both equally as good.
There are only a few lines of the Budapest that are true gambits, these are the lines where White plays an early Qd4 or f4 (which I think we can say are good for Black) and the Rubinstein variation with Nc3, where in exchange for keeping the pawn their queenside pawn structure is torn to shreds and in general Black gets good play. In all the other lines Black gets the pawn back.
My rating at Lichess is currently 1924 and I got a "top 1% player trophy" that was automatically put on my SeaTurtle profile page.
My rating at Chess.com is lower because I haven't had time to play many games on this account yet.
I used the Budapest to beat my friend who is a strong expert level player and this is the only time I've ever beat him using various different openings.
What exactly was the problem you were having with it? In his book IM Timothy Taylor makes an important observation about the Budapest - it is not a "feel opening" that someone can just pick up and play. There are precise tactical sequences and move orders you have to understand and follow in the opening and this goes for both the Adler and Rubenstein variations. I've stuck with the Budapest and haven't given up on it when everyone was saying "this is bad, you shouldn't use this" and I now I've amassed this knowledge and I'm reaping the rewards. Even in the games I've lost, like one of my games against "Bander" who is not the best blitz player but an extremely good player at longer time controls (and who has been playing 10 years - over 8 years longer than me!), he uses the Rubenstein variation with Nbd2 and in that last game I played against him it was dead drawn until I made a stupid blunder in the endgame because I was in time trouble and had only gotten five hours of sleep the night before.
My point is almost none of my losses in these games come from the opening and I'm always getting better or equal positions out of the opening, and these aren't blitz games either.
Getting advice from a bullet player on how to improve at chess is like taking health advice from an obese man holding a bag of doritos and a cigarette.
How ironic that you're claiming this opening will "hinder my growth", you should worry about your own growth with all the bullet games you play.
I don't watch GM games but I seem to remember recently Richard Rapport beat Boris Gelfand with the Budapest.
Lichess is a well known site where many IM and NMs play, and SeaTurtle is my username there. You can see my profile page here along with my top 1% trophy. http://en.lichess.org/@/SeaTurtle I'd say I know more about improving than you do since I've only been playing chess for 18 months yet I'm already this good. I bet you've been playing since you were a kid. If I had been playing as long as you, I'd be a GM already.
By the way I'm not just scoring "decently" with the Budapest, I have at least a 60% win rate as Black with this supposedly "bad" opening. That's wins, not counting the draws.
Do you ever think for yourself or do you just try to copy what openings are fashionable?
I just started playing chess this year but I've been playing every day, and up until recently I would only play as black against 1. e4 because I was trying to learn the Sicilian.
Recently I decided I better learn an opening against 1. d4 so I could play against it as well, and without knowing anything about it, I picked the Budapest Gambit (the normal knight to g4 version not the Fajarowics variation). I figured I needed to learn an opening for d4 and I just needed to pick one and it might as well be the Budapest.
So I got the Chessbase DVD on it and started reading about it. After this cursory research I had mixed feelings about my decision to learn the opening. On the one hand a lot of what I read on forums said the Budapest was a bad opening. On the other hand, in the Chessbase DVD, the instructor IM Andrew Martin sounds very enthusiastic about the Budapest, you can hear it in his voice. I have several other Andrew Martin DVDs and in none of them does he sound that enthusiastic and amused when he's talking about an opening. I also know IM Andrew Martin is friends with GM Nigel Davies, both being from the UK, and Davies plays the Budapest sometimes in high level games, so if players of the caliber of Martin and Davies think the Budapest is good, then there must be something to that.
Most of the first 20 or so games I played with the Budapest I lost, but now that I'm becomming familiar with it I seem to be having more success with it, and I seem to actually have more success with the Budapest than the Sicilian.
What makes the Sicilian a worse opening I think are all white's ready made attack plans. If you'll remember I talked about this in my last post here. The Sicilian has been analyzed and studied so much that white doesn't have to be creative in order to beat it, white just selects a ready made plan such as the Grand Prix attack, Alapin, Closed Sicilian, etc. I think it is very telling that when I went into Barnes & Noble last week looking for chess books, the only books I could find on the Sicilian were ways to beat it such as "How to Smash the Sicilian" etc. There were no books about how to actually play the Sicilian as black. I find when I play the Sicilian I usually have to deal with a white attack from the start. Again, I've only been playing chess for about 6 months now, so all these people I play against have been practicing with their chosen "anti-Sicilian" for years and I'm having to go up against that.
With the Budapest it seems like black has the initiative more. White actually responds to what I'm doing instead of the other way around, and a lot of people don't seem to know what to do against the Budapest. It's less common than the Sicilian and there aren't these ready made attack plans against it that white can choose from at their liesure. The only ready made attack plan in the Budapest I've read about is for black with the rook lift. I have more fun playing the Budapest and I seem to be having more success with it than the Sicilian despite studying it only a fraction of the time.