Shatter the Philidor Defense with the Zombie King gambit

While the Philidor Defense has fallen out of favor for not being ambitious enough, it is one of the oldest and most played openings for Black. So one might forgive you for thinking the theory for it is well known, yet it is still played now and has 45% winning chances for Black. In this post I will describe a weapon that will utterly crush your Philidor opponent with seemingly crazy moves that nevertheless never leave White at a disadvantage. In fact, from the critical position of this gambit, less than 3% of people play the correct move with White, meaning it's something of a novelty your opponents won't be prepared for.
Meet the Zombie King gambit, an opening named and popularized by YouTuber Adamisko šach. It arises from natural moves on both sides (the losing move for Black is even considered good at low engine depths): 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 d6 reaches the Philidor defense. We reply with 3. Bc4 and they have to go 3...h6, which is the most played move in the position. From there we attack the center with 4. d4, they take, most common and best move 4...exd4 to which we replay with 5. c3, gambitting a pawn. We have reached the critical position.
From here, only two moves are worth taking into consideration: 5...dxc3, by far the most played in 65% of the cases, and 5...Nf6, played in 15% of the cases. The first one is a blunder that accepts the Zombie King gambit and leads to most satisfying continuations, the second one we will consider declining the gambit, in which we just capture back the d-pawn and we go either Bd3 or Qb3, depending on whether Black captures the e-pawn or not, then play normal chess.
Now, the Zombie King gets activated when Black greedily captures the c3 pawn. Having hyped it so much, you know that the next moves will not be mild and positional , so we follow 5...dxc3 with 6. Bxf7!! Black has no other reasonable options than to eat the bishop, hence the name of the gambit. The Black zombified king will mindlessly eat our pieces until finally getting decapitated.
From this position, only three moves don't lead to mate. From those, one of them is giving up the queen, the other is giving up the rook. Most played move, Ke8, leads to mate in 3 after Qh5+ and Qf7#, and has been played in 40% of cases. The most challenging (and still badly losing) response from Black is 7...Kf6, to which we respond with 8. Qf3+ ,feeding the king one more piece, then 9. Qf7, cutting off any escape.
In this position, Black has +7 points of material: a pawn, a bishop and a knight. The Stockfish eval is +2.5 for White! Four moves don't lead to mate from here: two of them just give up the queen outright, another is cutting off the e7-b3 diagonal for our queen, giving back all material while the king runs away in shame all over the board, while the last one, the best, is the one that maintains the +2.5 eval: 9...Nf6.
Now whichever move we respond with: 10. f4+ (recommended by the engines) or 10. Nxc3 (which is still good and leads to funnier lines), Black is lost. Remember that this is after they played the best possible moves after Bxf7+. And look at the Black's position! The only pieces that are developed are a knight and the king. This opening is another reminder that it doesn't matter how many pieces you have, but how many you can use.
Feel free to explore all the possibilities with the Zombie King Gambit study on Lichess (the LiChess Tools browser extension is recommended to be installed, but it works without it, as well).
Here is the video Adamisko made for the same gambit:
[youtube:ZpDaO0ZfVso]