Irish Gambit

The Irish Gambit arises when White answers 2...Nc6 with 3. Nxe5, taking the e5-pawn even though the c6-knight defends it. White gives up a full piece for one pawn, and the engine rates the position as a large advantage for Black. The line is also called the Chicago Gambit or the Razzle Dazzle Gambit, and some online opening books list it as the Schulze-Müller Gambit. That last name more properly belongs to the related Halloween Gambit, 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. Nxe5.

Black nearly always recaptures with 3...Nxe5. White's only real follow-up is 4. d4, which gains a tempo on the knight and sets up a broad pawn center. Some sources reserve the name Chicago Gambit for this continuation. After 4...Ng6 or another knight retreat, Black has no structural problems and only needs to develop sensibly to keep the extra piece. The central pawns and slightly quicker development are poor compensation, and the Oxford Companion to Chess calls the line unsound and inferior to the Halloween Gambit. In online play Black wins about three games in five, although White still scores more than a third.

Black sometimes declines the knight. Moves such as 3...Bc5, 3...f5 and 3...Nf6 reach positions classified elsewhere: the Busch-Gass and Chiodini Gambits, the Fraser Defense of the Latvian Gambit, and the Stafford Gambit of the Petrov's Defense. In those lines Black is the one who has given up a pawn, and the results are much closer to even than after the recapture.

The name comes from a joke. Chess historian Edward Winter traced it to a humorous article in the Columbia Chess Chronicle of July 1887 about a fictional Irishman, Dennis O'Flaherty. Near death, O'Flaherty explains that he played the sacrifice because he never noticed the pawn was defended. The earliest recorded game came in a simultaneous exhibition in Chicago on January 7, 1899, where D. T. Phillips used 3...Nxe5 4. d4 to defeat Harry Nelson Pillsbury. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle report of that game gave the line the names Chicago, Irish and Razzle Dazzle Gambit. A separate and far more respectable "Irish Gambit", 1. d4 d5 2. Nc3 c5, is unrelated.