Hey guys,

My question is for 1. d4 players who play the Sicilian against e4. Which variations do you prefer?

1.E4

g3 seems ok

I've played 1.d4 for about twenty years. My "idols", opening wise, are Dreev and Van Wely -- I noticed a lot of times that I was picking the same variations against various defences as they were playing, so in the end I'd just look at their games first for 1.d4 inspiration. Ambitious main lines.

Both also play the Sicilian: Dreev plays the Classical Sicilian a lot, and Van Wely used to play the Sveshnikov, but plays the Najdorf now (with not a lot of success, as far as I've seen).

Personally I've played the Accelerated Dragon for about ten years, then a bit of the Classical, BUT:

- I'm rated slightly below 2000 over the board, so most of my opponents play lines like the Morra, 2.c3, the Closed, et cetera. It doesn't really matter what I was planning for 2.Nf3 & 3.d4, since that's played only about a third of the time. Below 1700 I think hardly any White player plays the Open. The Morra gambit on the other hand, is a great reason for Black to play 1...c5 :-)

- I found that against strong players who did go into the Open sicilian I was planning to play, I was getting bad results, worse than expected. Probably don't understand the positions enough.

So now I'm preparing to switch to 1...e5.

i

where is the report abuse button in the forums?

In my late 10's and early 20's,I used to play the Dragon,with some disastrous incursions into the Sveshnikov realm

Then,when the opposition became stronger,I switched to the Paulsen and even played some Taimanovs.And in the mid 90's, I helped a friend of mine to hone his repertoire., so I traded my Gruenfeld notes for his Rauzer's and Sozin's....

But essentially,I am now a Paulsen player

I like the dragon.

It would have to be the Nardorf for me.

My first exposure to chess openings was in my first Chess Life magazine.  I started with 1.d4 for white and the Dragon against 1.e4.  I loved the dragon and scored well with it, but after 12 or so years I got tired of living on the razor's edge and of running into 1300 players that had 20 moves of Dragon theory memorized, I started looking at the Najdorf, then the Kan.  Then I moved to the French, which seemed to have a structure more akin to the queen's gambit I played with white.

I play the Dragon as black, though starting to go towards the Najdorf.

najdorf or classic.  not too familiar with dragon yet