The Petroff's Defence: The Cochraine's Gambit - C42

In one of our previous post we discussed the Petroff's Defence. Trevor Palmer's opinion is you have to learn 3 or 4 lines of Petroff's, however, you mustn't forget about bit hectic Cochraine's Gambit. As I have mentioned before, I have never been big fan of Petroff's Defence so I knew very little about this gambit.
So I looked up this gambit in my database and much to my surprise, such an "unsound" opening was employed by some grandmasters like Topalov against Shirov, or Nigel Short against Kramnik and the list of players rated 2500+ who have used this gambit is rather long.
Then I decided to bring you 3 games - two of them I have already mentioned above and the last one was played by Konstantine Shanava (2521) against Mikheil Mchedlishvili (2635). In all three cases the battle was interesting and White scored 50%.