Bishops Opening

If you talk about the book "Attacking With 1. e4" and the Bishop's Opening, you're missing the point a bit.  What Emms aims to do is use the Bishop's opening as a transpositional device to get to this King's Gambit Declined position:

Black has a wide range of choices here, including 6...a6, 6...Bg4, 6...Ng4, 6...Na5 and 6...O-O.

Using the Bishop's opening to get to this position leaves black unable to play a Petroff's Defense, Philidor Defense, Latvian Gambit, Vienna Game (with 3...Nxe4), and of course the King's Gambit Accepted.  White's move-order is specifically chosen so that the options of moves would lead to positions inferior than the one obtained here.  A sample path is 1. e4 e5. 2. Bc4 Nf6 3. d3 Nc6 4. Nc3 Bc5 5. f4 d6 6. Nf3.

As mentioned, black has plenty of options along the path.  But the positions they leave him with have less upside than accepting the position above.  For instance, black can play 3...d5 -- but after 4. exd5 Nxd5 5. Nf3 Nc6 6. O-O followed by Re1 black has some problems defending his e-pawn.

Most other deviations from the "track" white is laying down will lead to inferior positions.  So this is the beauty of Emms move order (although he is not the first to suggest it).   He suggests in his book that white is scoring 55-57% with this line and given that white can count on arriving into it quite frequently, time invested here can pay big dividends.

Thanks for the info chuckg99.

I have not read the Emms book fully so i was not aware he was using the particular move order to reach prefered position via transposition. I have only skimmed through the book off the shelf and took notice of the opening he suggested.

Its pretty interesting idea.

Thanks.