How much does the first move matter?

I will eat my hat if it's not.

That's a little silly. First, we don't know if chess will be a drawn game, when/if solved. Secondly, even if it is, it's not necessarily a drawn game starting from opening A or opening B.

99.9% of GMs agree with me. You're right that we don't know for sure, but it's clear from our understanding of the game.

As regards from certain openings, well clearly black is winning after 1. e4 e5 2. Ba6??, but I don't think the ones in this thread are quite bad enough to change the 'ultimate assessment' of the position.

I think that the ultimate assessment of opening A is a white win. It's a close call, though.

I don't know if 99.9 % of all GMs agree with you on this, and I find it rather irrelevant. I guess more than 99.9 % of all Christians believe in God. But that doesn't make it more (or less) likely that God exists. Whether or not chess is a drawn game will most likely be determined by computer scientists and/or mathematicians. Not by GMs. 

If chess is a drawn game from the starting position, then it seems unlikely (to me) that it would be a drawn game beginning from opening A, when White is already a pawn ahead, and is better developed.

pawn_eater, what about opening B then?

Looks drawn to me.

It's very relevant because GMs are an authority on chess. A better analogy would be what percentage of theology professors believe in a god or not (I have no idea what the figures are on this).

You don't need to be anywhere near GM standard (I can understand this at expert level) to appreciate that games of chess or won and lost on imbalances, and these imbalances have to be created and do not exist in the starting position. White's opening move advantage does enough to make black's path to the draw slightly harder to find than white's (hence the 55-45 stats in human chess), but no more than that.

Thanks, pawn_eater. 

madhacker, of course GMs know a lot about chess, but their hunch about the game being drawn is nothing more than that: a hunch. 

I'm imclined to think that chess isn't a drawn game. Of course, I don't know. But I have reasons to lean this way. The prime reason is this. At a 1000 level, imbalances matters little. At a 1500 level they matter more. Here an advantage of something like 3 pawns is likely to lead to a won game. At the 1000 level, even an advantage of 5-10 pawns can easily be blown away. At higher levels, even a rather small advantage is almost a certain win, as far as I can tell. So, at the highest level, even a tiny, tiny advantage should equal a won game. If this is correct, then the first move advantage of White should be more than enough to win the game, if not all the time, then in the majority of games - at a "perfect level".

Who says the first move is an advantage? The statistics right? The statistics compiled from millions upon millions of games played by imperfect human players

Arctor, I hope you are kidding. You don't need stats to show the first move advantage. 

Above: an even position. White to move, and win. If it was Black to move, Black would win. Yes, being the first to move is an advantage. No stats needed. 

On the contrary, the percentage of draws goes up as the standard of the players goes up. At super-GM level, more than half of games are drawn.

"I think it's almost definite that the game is a draw theoretically." Bobby Fischer

"I know that with perfect play, God versus God, Fritz versus Fritz, chess is a draw" Nigel Short

I would say the first move matters a lot. Some are favorable, others not so much. They do however determine how the game goes. Positions can transpose, so my argument applies more to the first few moves, but the principle is still the same.

To madhacker: Okay, so Bobby and Nigel are wrong too. So what? Don't you understand the argument I gave?

Amateur, why do you think 1. e4 f5 is better for White than opening A?

From what I understand about your engine's definition of the best opening, this would be a much better opening for white:

Although people have found names and continuations for these openings, it's not 100% established that they are the correct corresponding openings. In fact, both opening A and opening B set up the same checkmate as above.

Continuation of opening A:

The problem with this definition is that no decent player will play into the opening. Unless you're playing a horrible opponent (or if your opponent wants to mess with your head), you'll never see black play opening A or white play opening B.

Even if opening A is the Borg Defense and opening B is the Barnes, they are not plausible openings. As you said, white has no advantages after his first move in opening B and black not only doesn't have any good aspects of his move in opening A, but loses a pawn in the process. Further, neither of the openings feature forced moves, so black can chose to keep his pawn in opening A and challenge the center with d5 instead. Why would your opponent voluntarily chose to play into this opening when it's so obvious that he'll be at a disadvantage?

Uh-oh...the first move isn't such an advantage here. The side to move is an inextricable part of a position and you can't pass ultimate judgement on a position unless you know that information. With regards the starting position, the only reason we percieve White to have an advantage (whether it's ultimately true or not) is past experience....if for the next hundred years, Black started winning vastly more games than White we would soon change our tune eh?

I don't get what you're trying to argue here cigoL

Not entirely true about white winning due to perception. There are a few differences that favor white, the main one being that it may move first. This gives white a tempi of time advantage that black must win back or compensate for in order to even draw. A tempi is a unit of time in chess that's equivalent to  1 move. An application of this concept is to have black's moves mirror white's. Except in the instance of a draw, white will always checkmate a move before black. There is no possiblity for black to win in this situation because white is a move ahead. In lower level games, it doesn't make AS MUCH of a difference, although it still does impact the game through opening options and piece development. This depreciation of the tempi advantage is usually due to aimlessly moving pieces back and forth and/or blunders. However, when grandmasters play, they tend to take advantage of everything that they have in their favor. White's advantage is slight to begin the game, but it's still a difficult obstacle for black to not only compensate for, but to overcome in order to win a game. For example,if two players of equal strength play each other and neither of them blunders, the game will often come down to a pawn race. If white can hold on to it's tempi advantage over black throughout the game, white will have the luxury of being one step ahead of black in the race as so: