1. d4 d5
2. c4

By far the two most common opening moves in chess are 1. e4 and 1. d4. In previous headers, we’ve looked exclusively at king’s pawn openings, those that begin with 1. e4. Today, we take a look at 1. d4.

At first glance, it might look like whether white opens with the king’s pawn or the queen’s pawn would not make a tremendous difference, but in fact it does. There are two key things that distinguish 1. d4 from 1. e4. First, unlike the e4 pawn, which is unsupported after the opening move, the d4 pawn is protected by the queen. This means that black’s possibilities for undermining the pawn are more limited. And second, instead of opening a diagonal for the development of the light-square bishop, it opens a diagonal for the dark-square bishop. The light-square bishop on f1 is capable of attacking black’s weak point at f7, and this is a common theme in 1. e4 openings, but the dark-square bishop can’t do that. As a result of these considerations, queen’s pawn openings tend to lead to slower, more positional games, with less rapid development and fewer opportunities for immediate attack than king’s pawn openings.

The classical reply by black, just as in the 1. e4 opening, is to restore symmetry with 1… d5, preventing white from immediately playing 2. e4 and establishing a pawn centre. In the king’s pawn openings, after 1. e4 e5, white has a wide variety of continuations available, but in the queen’s pawn case, one option for the white’s second move has proved clearly superior to all others: 2. c4, the Queen’s Gambit. Now, gambits are usually attacking openings, but despite superficially looking like a mirror image of the aggressive King’s Gambit, the Queen’s Gambit is not that at all. In fact, it could be said that it’s not really a gambit at all, since in practice black cannot prevent white from recapturing the sacrificed pawn. It does, however, have a strategic commonality with the King’s Gambit, in that the idea is to lure black’s centre pawn to the wing and allow white to develop a strong pawn centre.

The three main replies black has available are: accepting the gambit with 2… dxc4 (the Queen’s Gambit Accepted, or QGA), defending the d5 pawn with 2… e6 (the Queen’s Gambit Declined, or QGD), and defending the d5 pawn with 2… c6 (the Slav Defence). We’ll look at each of these in future headers.

The Queen’s Gambit is one of the oldest chess openings, appearing in the Gottingen manuscript of c. 1490, but its slower and less aggressive nature made it less attractive to the romantic players of the 19th century than the king’s pawn openings. But with the rise of the classical strategic ideas of Steinitz and Tarrasch around the turn of the century, it gained popularity, becoming one of the most commonly played openings in the 1920s and 1930s, and it remains popular today.