You could play the Elephant Gambit 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 d5 which avoids the Ruy Lopez
and other double king pawn openings. See my article at Chessville called Elephant
Gambit Miniatures in my column called "The Search for Dragons & Mythical Chess Openings". Against 1.e4 e5 2.Bc4 you could play 2...d5 the Khan Gambit which
transposes into an Elephant Gambit.
The Elephant Gambit is not well known and will take your opponent out of his
opening book knowledge. The database says that Black wins 50% of the time
which is better than the 46% by the Sicilian Defense. There are some nasty
tricks and traps in the Elephant Gambit.
Best Regards
DarthMusashi
So I've been doing a lot of playing online blitz and OTB long and such. With White I'm pretty okay with everything. I can handle basically any response to my 1.d4 pretty well. With black I can fight 1.d4 quite well. My Benko gambit is pretty decent if I don't have one of my occasional brain hemorrhages and start hanging things and my KID is pretty decent too (the wonderful thing about most KID lines is that while it's difficult to play, the basics are easy. Charge up one side while trying to not die on the other. Simple to learn, hard to do)But I just can't figure out what to do against 1.e4.
For most of my time playing chess tournaments and such I've played the sicilian, but the sheer number of playable sidelines, anti-sicilains and main lines has thrown me for a loop (2.Bc4, 2.b4, 2.c3, 2.Nc3, 2.d4, and many more lines that suck if you know how to play against them, but are irritating if you don't) On the off chance that I can get to a mainline sicilian position, I still don't much enjoy it.
So I'm looking for alternatives. I don't really know much about 1...c6, 1...e6 1...e4 and nothing about any other lines. What are some interesting openings that lead to some dynamic/sharp counterplay, that don't have as massive a body of theroy you really NEED to know to play well like the sicilian does?