FurryKittens: My last comment was posted before I read your last comment. Good point that if I'm trying to avoid lots of theory, Game Explorer probably isn't the greatest way to analyze an opening's potential.
For what it's worth, the look and feel of those first 6 moves are enticing. Also, you've expressed more fervent advocacy of it than anyone else has of a different opening, which totally counts. Oh, and extra points for sweet name & avatar.
After 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Nf6 you can play 4.d3 and transpose back to the usual setup. Black can try 4...d5 but I don't really trust it because the e5 pawn is an easy target.
The four knights is also a great suggestion just getting your knights out before your bishops.
I've tried 4.d3, and I guess I would need to man up and learn the followthrough, because I was generally unhappy with how my light-squared Bishop felt afterward.
Four Knights feels good, but it still begs the question of what to do next. I almost feel like it doesn't really count as its own opening until you decide where to move your d pawn and fist bishop. [eg: 4.Bb5 I'd call a "Ruy Lopez" rather than a "4 Knights", and 4.d4 I'd call a "Scotch"... I'm almost certainly wrong, but you get my point]
It al depends what you consider as not too much theory and your style as a player.
Hi shenanigator.
What do you play (or intend to play) against, e.g., the Sicilian, or the French? Knowing how you play against other popular openings might help guide our choices in a direction you're more likely to enjoy and have success with.
e5
Imo,
The story of opening theory or rather learning moves from super bots or super Gms it can be done in any openings.
There are openings that can be useful to know the moves from super bots or super Gms, for example :
and there are opening that can't be useful to know the moves from super bots or super Gms, for example :
from this position even if it would never have been played by humans you can look at what Stockfish would have played let's say 5) c3 then you play all the good enough moves in the position and look each time at what Stockfish would have played by creating an opening book of the bot where you put all the moves etc. then you will have created opening theory of maybe 5 moves from this position where you will play the Stockfish moves by memory and it helps like if you asked the help from Stockfish for 5 moves.
a : If you have madness to believe your opponents play "memory cards" and win because they know everything from memory, you can play a move that is stup*d or seems bad but where there is no refutation ex. 1) e4 e5 2) Bd3 (stup*d but there is no refutation ) or 1) e4 e5 2) Qe2 (seems bad but there is no refutation)
b : Otherwise 1) e4 e5 2) Nf3 Nc6 3) Bb5 and excepted 3)...f5 that I think is rarely played you don't have to know any theory just to be strong enough compared to your opponents ex. 3)...Nf6 you can play 4) Nc3 (not the best but not bad) or 3)...a6 you can play 4) Bxc6 and from memory Ian Nepomniachtchi played something like this against Ding Liren in the first game of the world champion and he didn't lose even though Ding Liren knows opening theory etc. (it was 1.e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a3 4. Ba4 Nf6 5. o-o Be7 6. Bxc6)
Thanks man
you can pretty much free style the bishops opening if you a decent player. i gotten decent results online with 1.e4 e5 bc4 2.nf6 3.d3 nc6 4.a3!? with f4 intentions
another good option is the g3 vienna. you pretty much just need some knowledge vs early 3...d5 and a good idea on the general formation when black goes for piece play. if black tries anything with the slow c6, d4 is usually the antidote.
DrSpudnik: fair point, although "statistically reliable" is a bit ambiguous. I'm fairly confident that such a large disparity in win/loss ratio between a sample size of 354 and a sample size of thousands (Ruy, Italian etc.) would be a statistically significant difference. Honestly that's a guess, but I'd bet on it.
Regardless, though, I can't see past giving black a free developing move. I hate to be a closed-minded negative nancy, but retreating to e3 as the best move after allowing a solid developing move would just feel horrible.
Furthermore, with rare openings, I suspect that if anything, white should be slightly more likely to win than if the opening become more popular, as white has presumably studied the opening more thoroughly than black (on average), so black would be operating under a time disadvantage.
In the case of the Ponziani I'd be open to the argument that there just aren't enough games, because the very close win/loss ratio is all I'm going on, but in the center game after Nc3, black has won more AND there's an identifiable weakness in the opening: giving up a tempo. [I realize that I'm looking at this very superficially and simplifying perhaps to an erroneous degree]