10 Openings Every Chess Player Must Memorise

The Scandinavian Defence, also known as the Centre Counter Defence, is an opening that sees black defend in a more uncommon way to the standard King’s Pawn Game. After white plays pawn to E4, instead of responding with the more traditional Open game, by playing pawn to E5, or with the popular Sicilian Defence, by playing pawn to C5, black plays pawn to D5.

This offers up the pawn as a sacrifice to whites’ pawn on E4, something which is essentially forced upon them if white wishes to keep control of the centre. The main line of this opening sees white take on D5 with the pawn, followed most commonly by black taking on D5 with the queen. This is the main strategy of this opening, to allow black to get their queen into the game very early. While white has the counter of queen’s side knight to C3, black can simply play queen to A5.

An alternative for black is to play the king’s side knight to F6. This creates a double attack on the D5 pawn, from the knight and the queen. The benefit of this is that black looses less time from having to move the queen a second time after white plays knight to C3. This variation is known as the Marshall Gambit.