How to decide

How do you go about deciding which is the best opening for you?  I pretty much know how I want to start as White, but as Black, I'm not sure what to play vs. 1.e4.  Usually I play the Sicilian, but there's about a million variations, and I hear both good and bad things in the Caro-Kann vs. French debate.  I'm new, so I guess something that's relatively easy to grasp is best, but any help is appreciated.

1...e5, is pretty good is simple the openings you really need to worry about are the Ruy Lopez and the kings gambit.

play whatever u feel good playing.

Study one particulair opening really good. master it, look at gm games. Then when you start to see results, you've mastered it! Then go on to the next one, and try to do the same thing. You will learn a lot and it will be fun because you notice so many different things between openings.

first i suggest you look at opening principles..

space occupation/control

piece developement,

stabilising pawn structure.

then study the principles like a million times. (chessmaster academy is really good with this.)

then jump into endgame play.

study it twice as hard as the opening principles. (its counter intuitive i know but the rewards are enormous!!!)

against 1.e4 I suggest:

** the alekhine  (to stress the concept of imbalance in chess)
** closed and open sicilian  (to stress the concept of pawn structures)
** center  counter defence (to stress the concept of initiative)

hope that helps..

just plain instinc's

 There are a lot of variations in the sicilian, but which one you choose is almost entirely decided by black. For example if you always respond to 1.e4 by playing 1...c5,2...d6,3...Nf6 and 4...g6 (inserting cxd if necessary) you'll get a Dragon pretty much whatever white plays. You only have to watch out for the c3 sicilian and the smith-morra, but they are not popular at normal time controls