How to Add a Trap to Your Repertoire

The failure mode

Somebody learns a trap. They prepare the winning line eight moves deep, complete with the queen sacrifice at the end. They play it that evening.

The opponent declines. They now have a position they have never studied, reached by an opening they only chose because of the trap, and they lose a game they had no business losing.

This happens constantly and it is entirely avoidable.

The arithmetic

The exciting branch is the rare one. Preparing it first is how people end up with a trap and no opening behind it.

A trap fires when the opponent plays a specific move. Even a very tempting one is chosen a minority of the time, and the alternatives are the majority of your games.

So the branch that gets prepared first, always, is the one where nothing interesting happens. That is the branch you will be in most Tuesdays.

The rule

Prepare the declined line before you prepare the trap.

That is the whole discipline. If you cannot be bothered to work out what you do when the opponent plays sensibly, you should not be playing the line at all, because that is the position you are signing up for.

A useful test: describe your plan in the declined position in one sentence. If you cannot, the trap has been doing all the work and the opening underneath it is empty.

What makes a trap worth including

The opening is sound without it. The Fried Liver is worth learning because the Italian Game is a real opening whether or not anybody falls for anything. The Blackburne Shilling is not, because outside the trap the move is simply bad.

The difference the article turns on. On the left, decline the trap and White still has a normal Italian Game. On the right, decline it and Black has moved the same knight twice for nothing.

The bait is a natural move. A trap only fires if the losing move is the one a reasonable player wants to play. If it requires your opponent to blunder in a way nobody blunders, it will never fire.

The punishment is short. A refutation you can hold in your head under time pressure is preparation. One that runs fifteen accurate moves is a liability, because you will forget the twelfth.

How much of your repertoire

Very little, and it should shrink as you improve.

Traps age badly, for reasons we set out in every chess trap works exactly once. They cost the same weekly review as everything else while their value falls with your rating. That combination means they should be a garnish rather than a course.

A reasonable ceiling: no more than one trap line per opening, and only where the opening stands on its own.

Where they genuinely earn their place

There is one case where the maths is entirely in your favour: when the trap fires on the move your opponent is most likely to play anyway.

Then it is not a trap at all. It is preparation against the most common continuation, which happens to win material. That is the best kind of opening knowledge there is, and it comes out of reading the frequency column rather than a trap video. We look at how to spot those in the most popular move is often not the best one.