Cheapo
Slang for a cheap or lucky tactical trick, often a simple trap that only works against an inattentive opponent.
A cheapo typically exploits a shallow tactical oversight rather than deep positional understanding, and successfully landing one is sometimes seen as a minor stroke of luck rather than pure skill.
Etymology
Cheapo is ordinary English slang, “cheap + -o” (a colloquialising suffix), with Etymonline dating the general adjective “inexpensive” to 1967. The chess sense is one of the best-documented coinages in the whole lexicon. Edward Winter, reviewing a game annotated by Eliot Hearst, calls it “the earliest occurrence of 'cheapo' that we recall seeing in a chess context,” and reports that in Chess Life, July 1962, Hearst wrote the term was coined by US master Dr. Karl Burger, “who has won a large percentage of his games by such a maneuver.” The full glossary entry reads: “a move which threatens something so obvious that only an idiot would fall for it, and he does.” Notably the chess usage predates the general slang record — the OED's own citations for “cheapo” as a noun start only in 1975.
First documented: 1962 — Eliot Hearst, “A Gentle Glossary,” Chess Life, July 1962, p. 154 — crediting the coinage to US master Dr. Karl Burger
Translations
Translations for this term haven't been added yet.