French vs. The Sicilian

Hi Panagiotis,the caro is my favorite opening and i wonder if ..3Bg4 is safer\better for black in this variation,what do you think?thanks,

Is that even a line? Allowing Ne5 is basically saying "I would enjoy playing a worse position just for the sake of having a worse position and making you prove it's worse.

powerful  play by Jobava!i'm very impressed and probably will try the Nf6 variation given the opportunity.Thanks a lot for the insightful remarks and the game

Ignore both of those openings and just play ...e5 until you have worked out your exact style of play; you'll learn a lot quicker this way and moves tend to be more logical.

It also depends upon what level you're playing at. The Sicilian tends to be very sharp (and the Scheveningen is met very nicely with 6.g4 amongst competent players).

Ignore everyone who tells you not to play a certain opening due to your skill level. Just started playing a couple months ago, been playing tournament chess since late 2011.

arin 3 - I completely disagree with anyone who trots out the standard response "Do not play an opening until you reach level Blah, blah. Just play e5 or d5 and develope your peices."

I disagree with this advice for a couple of reasons:

1) Within certain openings you have set stradigy's, set end game, and standard sets of patterns that you will see over and over again. By studing an opening in a holistic way - not just the rote memorization of moves, but why a move and what is the stradigy behind a sequence of moves you can and should improv faster.

2. If makes it much easier to pick your GM games go through and you should be able to force pattern recongition based on your opening so the pattarns should be more applicaable to you.

I never broke out of the 1700's FIDE even 25 years ago when I took it serious for a couple of years, so I could be missing something. But, I think there is some merit to studing openings, patterns, and stratidgies that you will encounter.

Also if I can add - I do nothing for my chess right now. I started playing again about a year ago after 25+ years away. I play a couple of games a week. I do not analysis them, I do not do tatics daily, weekly or monthly, I do not play through 30 GM games a day at pace. 

I literally play a couple of games and then go on with my normal life. I beleive this respresents the majority of real life chess players. By studying an opening at least I (and I presume many others) are actually doing something to improve other than move peices around the board a couple of times a day.

By studing an opening I have something to focus on - to work toward improvement of some level.

I know I iwll not do 15-20 tatic problems everyday, I know i will not play through 10,000 GM games this year at pace, and I know I will not analysis every game I play -

I can see myself honestly playing through a couple of GM games a week in a given opening just to see what they do different. I will analysis my games at least until they break out of book, and I might even do a few tatic problems within a given opening.

So for myself, and the vast majority of players studing an opening can be the catipult to some kind of study and is much better than what they do now - 

Sorry for the rant - I just hate the canned answer "Don't study openings" , not all of us have aspirations of cute little letters (other than Dr.) in front of our names.

I don't need to be GM to say that Sicilian, French, and, Caro Kann are good defenses, seek to refute any of those 3 is simply a waste of time. It is my humble opinion.

Good chess to everybody! and happy 2015

If you like studying openings for interest and fun then that's great - I'm not trying to take that away from you.  But, if you're suggesting that studying openings in isolation is going to make you a better Chess player then I couldn't disagree more.  Almost any of those other things you mention (including moving pieces around the board) is going to be a better use of your precious Chess study time than studying openings.  Ask just about any strong player/master and they will tell you the same - that they most likely hardly studied openings at all until they reached at least 1900 OTB.  All it takes for me to negate all your hours of opening study is to play 1.b3/b4/c4/e3/f4/g3, then you're on your own on about move 3, with nothing but your actual Chess ability to rely on to play the game.

I actually tried switching from 1..e5 to the Sicilian a few months ago and switched back after a few weeks when I realized how much theory I would need to know just to not get murdered.  There are many benefits of playing 1..e5.  For one thing, it follows classical opening principles so the patterns and techniques you learn there will be applicable to many other classical positions as well (such as the d4 openings), which makes more efficient use of your study time.  Patterns that you learn in the French and Sicilian tend to be more specific to those systems.  Someone else earlier said that it has a lot of theory:  it does (as with pretty much any opening), BUT, I find that 1..e5 tends to be more forgiving if you make a misstep, unlike the Sicilian where it can be very hard to recover.  Then there's also the thing about 'getting your pieces out', which leads to more open positions where you need to rely on tactics, which is what most amateurs (me included) need to practice.

I know it's not what you want to hear, but I'm just trying to help.

1..e5 has more theory than many sicilian variations, it's a matter of taste. Playing e5 won't make you a better player

I think my point was completely missed, so I will try one last time (although it maybe in vain).

Things we know:

!) We can all agree that studing openings (esspecially the rote memorization of moves- I refer to that as "Call and Response Chess") is not going to make anyone better. 

2) We can also agree that not one person who ever studied opening therory that large majority of their time ever made it past class A. 

3) We can also agree that the majority of people (myself included) do not spend anytime studying - 

4) Chess players have an addiction to chess openings! And spend a preponderence of time their - dispite the point 2.

These four things we know for certain.

We also know that Playing through GM games at speed and slower on annotatied games will improve your chess through pattern recongition. Very few players bother with this.

We know that below 2000 the majority of games are won on tactics - still myself and 90% of the ameture chess world would prefer to read an opening book than do a tactical problem.

We know that analizing ones own games is important to playing better chess.

I am suggesting that if you take away the ability of a player to study an opening by rote memorization - and that you force the study of an opening through the playing of GM games. You have achieved two goals - you have fulfilled the desire of the amuture to study an opening, but you have also gotten the ameture to play through and study GM games - something he was not going to do before hand. By placing the GM game in the context of an opening you have in effect tricked the brain that it is no longer doing something boring, but something that it wants to do.

Tactics- I hate studing tactics, but if I was looking at tactics within the context of an opening and I could say "Oh yea I have seen this pattern before in my games" I would be more apt to want to do tactics - again I have tricked the brain into doing something that it doesn't want to do by hiding it in the context of something that it enjoys. 

This holds true with end game study and personal game study.

The point is that studying the opening just for the opening sake is not the point (as I have said before, at most lower levels you are out of book within the first ten moves). The goal is to get low and mid level players who are finding it difficult to do the right things the ambition and motivation to do the right things by placing it in a context that they enjoy.

Think of it as hiding your dogs medician in a T-Bone.

The short of it is - I know what I should do but I also know I am lazy and unmotivated to do those things - by placing these things in a context that I enjoy perhaps I will get them done.

The Flexable French - I have only done a pre-curser of the book but I like what I have seen so far!

It has diagrams of plans, where and how you eventually want your peices set up - not a bunch of move orders to get there (although there are move variations as well)

I love the plan diagrams - Sam Collins does this alot and it really helps me see the overall picture.

I think I will enjoy this book - 

@TheChessAnalyst:

I see your point.  Basically, opening study is the only kind of Chess study that you enjoy, so in that case I'd agree that it will be probably be better for your game than doing no study at all.  I just wanted to make sure you weren't under any illusions that it's the best way to improve.

Have fun studying the French! (I'll practice my Bird's opening a bit in case I bump into you in Live )

Who needs study when you can just play and sip orange juice?

or beer!

In a different thread Pfren wrote:

Control as much of the center as you can, develop your minor pieces fast, castle fast, take care not dropping pawns and pieces, avoid uneccessary pawn moves and queen excursions.

Another guy in this thread said play only e4, e5 until elo 2000 - So, the last three weeks I played only e4, e5 and practiced nothing but tactics and played games from a Kasperov book I found -

Result +112 Elo points - 

Okay maybe I am a becoming a beleiver....

French defence is very strong and reliable against 1.e4.  1...- c5 might put you in trouble very quickly if you don't know the theory... French defence is actually the subject of my study now and it's not dull at all as White has to play right and very dynamic to stay in the game. Go for it! 

french if you prefer d4. it shows that you like more solid openings with more "boring" and positional play. french has the strength, and solidness, while sicilian has the aggressivness and tactics, so i recommend french. but like the tronmowsky its an agressive opening with quick play.

Sicilian is better than french since your opponent can play advanced variation if they are skilled or they studied that position. advanced can give white good winning chances

That's ridiculous. The Advance Variation isn't the killer of the French. You come off sounding like someone who doesn't know how to play against the Advance.