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Beat The Sicilian Defense
Magnus Carlson and Many other strong players trusted the given system to crush the Sicilian Defense

Beat The Sicilian Defense

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Fayez58
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Hello everyone! Today I am going to show a simple method to play against the Sicilian Defense. Again, the purpose of this blog is not to refute the opening, but to show a simple method where you will not need crazy memorization. So with that being said, let's get started.

Introduction:

The Sicilian Defense occurs after 1..c5 against 1.e4.

In fact, it is the most popular opening against 1.e4. Therefore, you must know an way to play against it.

                                   

Now, firstly, we need to understand why it is so popular. The two main reasons are:

1. Black has so many options and it is so flexible that it is very hard to prepare against it.

2. Black gets decent attacking chances; often black gets all the fun and white just helplessly defends.

Now, I will propose a system that,

1. will allow white to play the same moves all the time. Thus, black doesn't get the advantage of opening as he wanted.

2. In this system, white gets a lot of attacking chances and you will get lots of fun.

As a result, in the opening, at least you will get the psychological victory.

The System:

Given the fact that Sicilian defense is too hard to memorize line by line, we will rather try to get a generalized system. In other words, we are going to execute the same plans regardless of what black tries to do. 

The system is consisted of three main stages of plans. 

1st plan: 

From this starting position of the Sicilian Defense, our first idea is to prepare the move d4 and then play d4. 

2nd Plan: 

In this system, we wanna castle queenside and get an exciting attacking position. So our second plan is to prepare queenside castling and then castle queenside as soon as possible.

3rd Plan:

Now that we have castled, we should start a deadly attack on the kingside with our kingside pawns. So our 3rd plan is to push the king side pawns and start a pawn storm.

I will end the analysis of the line here. But just to show how hard the position is here for black, let me show you just a variation of that position:

Summary:

In one sentence, against the Sicilian defense, you should first prepare the central break by Nf3, d4; then develop the queenside pieces and castle queenside by Be3, Nc3, Qd2 and O-O-O; and finally start pushing the pawns on the queenside by f3, g4, h4. The ideal position looks like this:

Caution:

In opposite-side castled positions like these, always remember not to waste a single move. Every tempo counts more than ever. 

Variations:

At first, I thought I would not provide any variations at all as that is not the goal of this blog. In the subsequent blogs, I will provide more lines and variations for specific systems black can play. To remind the readers, the goal of this blog is to provide a setup to lower your burden of memorization.

However, to prove this system works, I will provide three sample variations without branching out too much; one from Dragon Sicilian, one from Kan Sicilian and, the other from Scheveningen Variation.

Dragon Sicilian:

Kan Sicilian:

Scheveningen Variation:
Example Games:
Now I will show a couple of example games to show the power of this setup and how a couple of very strong players have lost helplessly against this setup. 
Example Game 1:
This was a game between Magnus Carlsen and Judit Polgar where Polgar defeated Magnus in just 19 moves!! (You can see, even the very best players tremble against this system.)
                                              
                                                 
                                       
Polgar on the way to defeat Magnus in just 19 moves even several years after her retirement


     
Example Game 2:
This game is an attacking masterpiece between two very strong players. You should understand you would get these types of crazy positions regularly if you play this system. Therefore, you would get lots of fun playing it.
Example Game 3:
This game shows how sharp the position is. Black played all the natural-looking moves and suddenly found himself lost in the opening already! 
 

Conclusion:

In the blog, I tried to show a simple setup. Just remember the three plans. Over time, the resulting position would be familiar to you as you play the system again and again. Not only that, it will help you to improve your understanding of tactics.

Write me in the comment if you have any questions. Thanks for reading.