Talk:Irish Gambit

Old talk

Sources for the name of this opening: and a number of other sources from the Google search . Krakatoa 02:07, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

• The Oxford Companion to Chess gives 1898 as the date for this game. The chessgames.com kibitzing indicates that the game was played Jan 7, 1899. This is early enough in the year to explain possible 1898 vs. 1899 confusion. If anyone knows definitively when this was played, that would be helpful. (Edward G. Winter is quite picky about such things, so if he has written about it, that might help.) Quale 07:30, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Another same-named opening?

Chess.com and Lichess both list 1.d4 d5 2.Nc3 c5 as the Irish Gambit, though I'm not sure where they're getting this name from. ISaveNewspapers (talk) 06:38, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

Merge or keep

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

@Bruce leverett: @Quale: Based on your reasoning for Konstantinopolsky Opening, would this be a keep as well? Or is there a reason to delete? Dayshade (talk) 16:26, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

Some short articles on unsound gambits are bad and should be merged and redirected if there's a suitable merge target. Other short articles on unsound gambits are okayish. I think this one is okayish. It's about 10 sentences. If it were merged, where would it go? Ten sentences on the Irish Gambit would be grossly excessive on most other pages. As I argued on Talk:Konstantinopolsky Opening#Verdict, I think a merge might have the ironic effect of increasing the prominence of a low-importance topic. I don't think the existence of this article causes any real problems except perhaps to offend the sensibilities of some people who think that any short article that has no prospect to attain FA quality has no place in the encyclopedia. I disagree. Quale (talk) 05:31, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

Yeah I'm kind of feeling similarly... I guess we should just keep all of these obscure 2nd/3rd move articles as a rule, unless we want to expand Open Game or King's Knight Opening with summaries of the more common lines (Ruy, etc) along side sentences about these obscure lines further down the page. Dayshade (talk) 05:45, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

Also, this gambit seems to just be a worse version of the Halloween Gambit, which makes me feel like it could fit as a note on that page. Ie, the idea is very similar, but simply with less opportunities for White than the Halloween. Dayshade (talk) 18:46, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

Keep per argument made by Quale. Khiikiat (talk) 11:36, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

What do you think of the possibility of merging it into Open Game or King's Knight Opening as part of a general expansion of those pages? Dayshade (talk) 14:45, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

@MaxBrowne2: and thoughts on this one w.r.t. the others? It kinda does give me a bit more of a joke vibe here which is concerning. Dayshade (talk) 15:15, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Requested move 3 September 2025

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: withdrawn. (non-admin closure) Khiikiat (talk) 08:53, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

---

Irish Gambit → Chicago GambitChicago Gambit – This is the primary name given in The Oxford Companion to Chess. See pp. 76–77, 476 (2nd ed.). Khiikiat (talk) 11:25, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

I see that other sites online give this opening the name "Irish Gambit" or "Irish (Chicago) Gambit", so I don't think the current page name is necessarily incorrect or improper. I know that elsewhere on Wikipedia, we generally stick with the article's original conventions (such as variant of English or format of dates) unless there is a compelling reason that a particular choice is more natural (e.g., US date styles make the most sense for US-specific articles).

However, I will note that online sources for opening names, particularly for uncommon openings, can be somewhat unreliable as there tends to be a lot of circular references between these sites (including back to Wikipedia). But I'm not really sure that we should allow a singular source to justify moving this article to a new title when other sources exist which support the current title.

"ChessOpenings.com".

"365chess.com".

Ovenel (talk) 20:36, 4 September 2025 (UTC)

Chessopenings.com is a personal website and cannot be used as a source. See WP:SPS. 365chess.com is better and has "Irish (Chicago) gambit". I agree that we should use the common name, but I think greater weight should be given to high-quality sources, such as The Oxford Companion to Chess. Khiikiat (talk) 09:54, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose per Ovenel and this and this and this. Also, please revert your changes that prejudge the outcome of this move request. YorkshireExpat (talk) 08:36, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

  Bookmoves.net refers to a different opening (1. d4 2. d5 3. Nc3 4. c5). The Lichess lesson is probably user-generated. See WP:SPS. The article by Shawn Gillen seems to be based on The Oxford Companion to Chess, which gives "Chicago Gambit" as the primary name. Khiikiat (talk) 09:56, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

  From a WP:COMMONTERM standpoint I'd argue self published sources have relevance where few reliable sources exist (the common term is the what people use most!), and anyway, you seem to be arguing that the Oxford reference constitutes an official name which is not relevant per WP:ON. Point taken on Bookmoves though. Here's another source to compensate, although they don't seem to have done the animation properly, it's clear that they regard Irish as the primary term and Chicago as secondary. YorkshireExpat (talk) 11:36, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

• Comment The stakes of this argument are not high. The reader who types "Chicago gambit" will get to this article, so Wikipedia correctly plays its role as a place to look things up. People seem to think that Wikipedia also has a role as an arbiter of the names of things, and so we must argue over which is the name and which is the redirect. However, this is not a good role for Wikipedia to play. Wikipedia has no independent authority over the names of things; we can only refer readers to reliable sources. If there are reliable sources coming down in favor of both names, Wikipedia can only present both of them and let the reader judge for himself.

Now let's talk about reliable sources. The article as of today does not have any. Hooper and Whyld is not a secondary source; it doesn't cite its own sources. Hooper and Whyld did prodigious research to compile this encyclopedia; but the reader who really wants to learn how or when the names were coined, or the connection between this gambit and Ireland, or between the gambit and Chicago, is on his own. Chessgames.com is not a generally reliable source either, because it is user-generated content. Of course, you will find citations of Hooper and Whyld all over the chess-related articles in Wikipedia, but in every case the editor was taking a lazy shortcut, and could have gone to find the "real" source and cited that instead. Sometimes we take the lazy shortcut with chessgames.com as well; for example, in U.S. Open Chess Championship, we refer the reader to a "U.S. Open Tournament Index" from chessgames.com. This is in fact a well-researched collection of articles about past U.S. Opens; it scrupulously relies on primary sources and cites them. But that's very much the exception rather than the rule for chessgames.com.

As it stands, Irish Gambit could not withstand the scrutiny of an AfD discussion, and moreover, the reader who tries to drill down into the sources quickly gets swamped in the comments of the Phillips vs. Pillsbury game. It's much more important to fix up our sources than to spend time arguing about the two names. Some of the commenters in that game have provided links to legitimate sources, and perhaps the best way to improve our own sources is to cite some of those. Bruce leverett (talk) 14:01, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

I think this is quite a nice reference. Certainly secondary; not even really about chess I don't think. YorkshireExpat (talk) 16:18, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

I do not have access to the whole article, only an excerpt from the beginning; the excerpt does not have anything interesting. Can you help with this? Bruce leverett (talk) 17:50, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

No I can't. If you don't find it interesting there's not much more to say. YorkshireExpat (talk) 08:56, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

• Comment Very insightful thoughts from Bruce. This makes me want to propose it for deletion. Notes on it can be kept on Open Game/King's Knight Opening (but this itself will be AfD soon most likely) and/or Halloween Gambit, which is simply an improved version of this gambit. Dayshade (talk) 16:07, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

  Normally, when proposing an article for deletion because of lack of notability, one should make a good-faith effort to find sources that would demonstrate its notability. I suspect that there are some, I'm just looking for sources that meet Wikipedia's criteria. Bruce leverett (talk) 17:53, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

  The name of the article is what's in question here, this is not AfD. What's your opinion on the name of the article? YorkshireExpat (talk) 08:57, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

  Leaning towards Irish as it's the status quo and per other arguments, but pretty neutral. I just find the fact that it's clearly an inferior version of the Halloween Gambit (this should probably be renamed to its person-based name) particularly irritating about its existence, and that the deathbed thing is clearly just a joke. Dayshade (talk) 13:08, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

Gillen's article

@Bruce leverett: If you have access to JSTOR, you can read Gillen's article there (JSTOR 48670298). Only the first two pages concern the Gambit. This is the relevant part of the second page:

dubious—such as the King’s Gambit or the Queen’s Gambit Accepted—have been proven to be sound by great players like Bobby Fischer or Garry Kasparov. But no chess grandmaster has been able to do anything with the Irish Gambit.

The one exception was an 1899 match played in Chicago between Harold Meyer Phillips and Harry Nelson Pillsbury, then regarded as one of the world’s best players. The match’s result was hailed in mainstream newspapers and the chess press, and can still be studied on a half dozen chess websites. Students of the game, however, have realized that the Irish Gambit had little to do with Phillips’s victory. He had simply outplayed his opponent.

Chess legend has it that the anonymous inventor of the Irish Gambit was asked on his deathbed what not very subtle ideas brought him to create this most dubious of chess openings.

“I hadn’t seen the king’s pawn was defended,” he responded.

Gillen does not cite any sources, and this may be a case of WP:CITOGENESIS.

Source	Pillsbury's opponent	Date
Hooper & Whyld (1992)	Unnamed	1898
Chessgames.com	D. T. Phillips	January 7, 1899
Wikipedia (2018)	Harold Meyer Phillips	1899
Gillen (2018)	Harold Meyer Phillips	1899

Khiikiat (talk) 12:04, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

He cites The Oxford Companion to Chess at the start. There's no evidence that he's citing Wikipedia from what I have sight of, but I guess you can see more than me. YorkshireExpat (talk) 12:29, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

Now this sheds some light and gives another name for the opening, the "Razzle Dazzle" gambit! YorkshireExpat (talk) 12:36, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

I am fairly certain that Gillen has copied Wikipedia. I have set out my reasoning in the table above. Gillen states that Pillsbury's opponent was Harold Meyer Phillips. The name Harold Meyer Phillips was added to the Wikipedia article on 18 November 2006 with this edit: Special:Diff/88550130. The Oxford Companion to Chess does not name the opponent and Chessgames.com states that the opponent was D. T. Phillips. The article by Edward Winter that you have found also states that D. T. Phillips was the opponent. Khiikiat (talk) 15:11, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

Yeah right. Forget Gillen. What's wrong with the Edward Winter thing? It's quoting two primary sources, one that talks about Pillsbury vs Phillips, which is probably the origin of the term 'Chicago Gambit', and an earlier piece that shows where the term 'Irish Gambit' comes from. If you don't like this as a source, then I'll AfD the article myself. YorkshireExpat (talk) 16:40, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

I was a little harsh in my assessment of Hooper & Whyld -- they do give a brief explanation of the connection between this variation and Chicago. But the Winter article is a very good secondary source for us to quote about Chicago. It cites and presents sources. Winter is a highly regarded historian of chess, and although this article is (I think) not under the auspices of some serious publisher, this is as probably as good as we can get for notability.

Winter's primary source for "Irish" is an article that looks very much like an extended ethnic joke/slur; that is, I suspect that "Dennis O'Flaherty" was fictional, and the anecdotes, including the one about "I did not see that the pawn was protected", were invented. If so, that doesn't mean that the name "Irish gambit" is less legitimate; if the name caught on, we should note that. But we should not quote that anecdote "in Wikipedia's voice". Bruce leverett (talk) 20:36, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

@YorkshireExpat: What's wrong with the Edward Winter thing? I did not say there was anything wrong with the article by Edward Winter. Edward Winter is a very reliable source. Khiikiat (talk) 23:22, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

@Bruce leverett: Yes, the name "Irish Gambit" is an ethnic slur. This is partly what Gillen's article is about. He writes:

My father had also internalized some ethnic clichés about the Irish and it played into his rationale for playing chess. “We can talk and we can write,” he would tell me, “and we are good at politics but there aren’t any famous Irish philosophers, mathematicians, or chess players.” Logical thinking and the discipline required to play chess well were antidotes, my father thought, to the sort of sloppy romanticism that had led his Uncle Jim and Aunt Agnes nowhere. I heard some of the same claims decades later when I was hired to teach English at Beloit College. One of my senior colleagues in the English department would taunt me about the Irish. “They can write and they can love and they can drink,” he would say, “but they can’t think.”

Khiikiat (talk) 23:24, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

• For what it's worth, Andrew Soltis has "Chicago Gambit" in Chess Life, August 1997, page 12, but it's just a retelling of the Phillips-Pillsbury story without adding anything to previous sources. Not enough to convince me the article needs to be moved. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 05:21, 8 September 2025 (UTC) Ultimately the only sources I can see that are of value are the two cited by Edward Winter, The Columbia Chess Chronicle from 1887 with it's silly story (which gave the name "Irish Gambit" and was clearly the source used by Hooper/Whyld) and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle article from 1899 about the Phillips-Pillsbury game, which was reproduced in several other papers. I found it by searching the Australian newspaper archive at trove.nla.gov.au. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 07:08, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Even though the discussion has been closed I'm actually leaning towards a move

Columbia University in New York was founded as King's College by King George II in 1754, and has (or certainly had in 1887) a very traditional "British" Anglican culture. The article in Columbia Chess Chronicle has no value from the chess perspective and just reflects the traditional British anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice, often in the form of "jokes". I remember hearing "Irish jokes" in the 70s, the American equivalent is "Polish jokes". Look at the list of chess club members in that journal and you won't see any Irish or Italian or Polish names. A move to "Chicago Gambit" or even "Razzle Dazzle Gambit" would not be inappropriate. After all the name comes from an anti-Irish "joke" article, not from a joke by an actual Irish person (and they do have a sense of humour). MaxBrowne2 (talk) 04:26, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

That makes sense, but isn't that arguably just another reason to delete? Half the article is basically a joke (the story with the "I didn't see the pawn was protected"), and Pillsbury losing to it once doesn't make it notable either. Dayshade (talk) 15:28, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

I'm not sure you are correctly understanding "notable". It's not about the difficulty or rarity of the achievement, it's about the "significant coverage". Almost 100 years after the Columbia article and 90 years after Pillsbury, both names were still around in published reference works. So they must have been pretty notable in their day. Bruce leverett (talk) 16:36, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, but wouldn't that just mean it deserves a sentence or two in another article as opposed to its own? Compared to e.g. Konstantinopolsky, which barely deserves its own article, it's so rare that it doesn't even have an agreed upon name, half the notability seems to be based on a joke and the other half on a single game, and it clearly seems to be an inferior version of the Halloween Gambit (I wonder if this should be moved to its personal name). Maybe people just thought the joke was so funny that it got an entry? Idk lol. This article just seems so silly and unnecessary to me. Dayshade (talk) 18:31, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

How is this a gambit?

I think the article should probably address what, if any, compensation White gets for the knight-for-pawn trade. Is "gambit" just a jocular way of saying that White blundered his knight? --Trovatore (talk) 19:46, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

One would need a reliable source to discuss questions like this. Do you have one in mind? Bruce leverett (talk) 20:11, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

No, but the people who work on the article might possibly have one. It's just something that confused me when I read the article. --Trovatore (talk) 22:19, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

@Trovatore: yeah, this is one of the most problematic articles we have. It just occurred to me to propose to integrate it into Open Game in a footnote, to avoid giving it more coverage than it deserves, what do you think? Dayshade (talk) 00:50, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

I'm not the one to ask. I'm not really an expert on chess, just an interested patzer. --Trovatore (talk) 01:50, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

The "people who work on this article" now include you, as well as me.

As encyclopedia editors, we are not qualified to answer highly technical questions such as exactly what compensation White gets. When we present a whole game, such as in the "Notable Games" section of a biographical article, we often try to add commentary, generally quoted or paraphrased from some reliable source, such as a book or article by a strong player. Back when we were discussing this article (see earlier in this talk page), I don't think I saw such analysis, and if there isn't any around, the reader is on his own.

The question of whether Pillsbury's opponent deliberately entered the gambit, or accidentally blundered his knight, is likewise not explicitly addressed by the sources I have seen. I suspect the former, but what I suspect is presumably of little interest to you.

I disagree that this is "one of the most problematic [chess] articles". Indeed, there was some discussion of it last September, as you can read above. But that discussion lasted just for a few days. I think that we ended up with an article that meets Wikipedia standards, and explains the history, in a modest way. Bruce leverett (talk) 01:55, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

Maybe we should change it to be an article about a game instead of an opening? Dayshade (talk) 02:31, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

There's some analysis by an RS of how he managed to defeat Pillsbury I've seen. Could make it into something comparable to Evergreen Game or Immortal Game. Dayshade (talk) 02:32, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

Point me to it? Bruce leverett (talk) 03:11, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

Individual games must pass a high bar to merit their own articles. Like extensive coverage in chess literature. The game you refer to doesn't come anywhere near. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 11:45, 11 June 2026 (UTC)

Yeah and I can't even find it anymore. I think I saw it back when we were discussing the article last year. Dayshade (talk) 15:58, 11 June 2026 (UTC)