Interesting Way To Transpose into the French Defense from the Owen Defense

ignore thrillerfan on the Owen, he just grumpy he not skilled enough to play it like i do!

many lines in the Owen involve a french like structure, and whether  its a bad french or not depends on which specific variation you speak of. Some lines like 1.e4 b6 2.d4 bb7 3.nc3 e6 3.nf3 bb4 4. bd3 nf6 5.qe2 d5 are actually quite comfy for black.

1.e4 b6 2.d4 bb7 3.bd3 nf6 4.nd2 e6 5. nf3 d5 is a french like position where black is pretty decent. Black has a 3-4 main options for counterplay in compensation for losing qb6.

1.He can play  for a5 later on and aim for ba6 (an improvement on a lot of b6 ba6 ideas on a french because f4 has been stopped),

2.He can play for ba6 without a5 if white doesnt play qe2 and trade on d4 and aim for an endgame with your dark squared bishop, 

3. you can also try the bold g5!? and h5 thanks to d2 knight blocking your bishop. black often castles 0-0-0 in these lines.

4. finally, black can play for a big pawn storm on the queenside, especially if white plays an early a3 trying to stop nb4 ideas. you will go c5-c4 b5 a5 b4 etc.

another french like line is 1.e4 b6 2.d4 bb7 3. bd3 nf6 4. bd3 e6 5.nf3 d5 which is considered by many the most critical line, but a lot of what i said early sort of still applies, except the g5 maneuver. GM Bauer recommends going for the queenside pawnstorm maneuver. But a5 ideas are also decent.

but anyone who dismisses all these lines as bad frenches simply isnt paying attention.  Not only are the strategies somewhat different , but white's early commitment's change the eval all together. For example, in most of these lines, white commits his knight to f3 early, which means some of the more deadly ideas in the french b6 early sidelines (like ne2 f4!) are out of the picture. queen on e2 is somewhat of a wasted tempo from a french perspective despite being a good move overall since black knows to not castle kingside and with a5 he can force ba6 )

No one plays an early 3.nc6 french to purposely remove the c5 possibility , they play it to get a different kind of game with early f6 and more maneuvering. if the Owen is a bad french, the french is a bad Owen!

is there one line that ever given me trouble with 1b6 the only one so far has been a specific family of replies involving the tricky bd3 nf3 nge2 formation, and even then the amount of people that know exactly what to do is extremely  small (so much so, that its all novelties in my research, no master games in a lot of this engine analysis). Black is not refuted in these problem lines, but the positions can be messy to say the least

Baloney!  That's why I have 5 wins and a draw in the last 6, and 8 wins, 3 losses, and 2 draws since the start of 2019, huh?

Believe me, it's utter crap!  Period, end of story!

Correspondence game ThrillerFan vs darkunorthodox 1. e4 b6 when?

but Thriller you are not even a master, you are hardly indicative of anything. Your score probably tells me more about your opposition more than anything. Show us some of those wins

I hope this is satire

I mean we have a 2200 and a 2050 here. Clearly one is stronger than the other by an appreciable margin but not by enough that we shouldn’t have them take this further somehow, if only for our entertainment...

ThrillerFan is 1850 fide. USCF ratings are somewhat inflated.

why would it be satire?

if i said "The grob is awesome, im 7-3 this year with it" would it matter at all? NO, all that says is I won 7 games with it. Same thing in reverse.

in fact, in my experience, a lot of weaker players cant play these types of openings accurately. They think playing unorthodox openings gives them a free pass in needing to be booked up agaisnt prepared opponents and suffer grueling defeats for it.

You want to learn how to play appropriately you check out the games of GM Bauer, GM Miezis, GM Blatny  some old games from Miles and IM Filipovic, they wont be definitive for a bullet proof repertoire but 80% of your answers are there. Im more interested in their scores than anyone elses 

USCF ratings are more accurate for US Players because every game is rated under that organization.

Of my 2900+ games, maybe 350 of them are FIDE rated.  Recently, it's the events I happened to perform bad.

My first event that was FIDE rated had me at 2226.  Of course that isn't accurate either.

If every game of mine were FIDE rated instead of about 10%, I'd be in the upper 1900s to low 2000s.

Looking at my FIDE rating would be like looking only at games by Lebron James while he was in Cleveland and they wore yellow that night.  Could be the best games he's played or the worst, but either way, it does not give you an accurate assessment.  If all I did was played in FIDE events, bet you $1000 that number goes up.

Thriller is a fine player, im not insulting his playing strength but trying to support that an opening sucks because you beat x amount of people playing agaisnt it., without showing those games or even knowing their ratings is just silly.

i for example, tend to do well vs the pirc using the g3 system (  nc3 bg2 be3 ne2 h3 qd2 0-0 etc) and must have like an 80% percent win rate agaisnt it. Do i claim the pirc sucks? no way.

US FIDE ratings are deflated as well. Clearly USCF and FIDE ratings are not equally strong no matter what, but I can’t think of any Americans under 2300 or so who have ever gone and played a decent amount of chess overseas and not gained lots of FIDE in the process

early b6  french was borderline main line in the french  advance not that long ago. the point is to remove the bad bishop. nowadays, the lines with qb6, bd7 bb5 are more popular for this purpose.

@darkunorthodox, just out of curiosity, how did you manage to lose 54 games out of 59 that you have played so far on chess.com!?

Blitz games, that is.

NOT TRUE!

There are lots of openings that are perfectly sound that do not suit my style of play.  The Grunfeld leads that group.  The Dragon falls in that category as well.  So does the Modern Benoni.  All three openings that I absolutely HATE in all caps!

But you know what?  They are SOUND, UNLIKE Owen's Defense!  "Sound" and "Refuted" are not Black and White.  There is this word called "DUBIOUS" (the shades of gray in chess).  The Latvian Gambit falls in that category, and so does Owen's Defense!

Dubious openings are not sound!

You serious going to compare the latvian with the Owen's? SERIOUSLY? Latvian is objectively busted. At best black might limp home to a nasty draw being 1.2 down the whole game. Owen's at worst is 0.4-0.5

So I guess that's why the Latvian Gambit is still popular in Correspondence Chess, because it's busted, huh?  If you are going to tell me that I'm making an invalid argument about Owen's Defense, I'm going to throw it right back at you with your invalid argument about the Latvian Gambit.  Even Tony Kosten says "The Latvian Gambit Lives".

However, despite this, I still claim it is highly dubious, once again, because "Sound" and "Refuted" are not the only two ways to describe an opening, and only someone who is naive will assume that "dubious" has only one degree, and that it's 3 fixed points.  No!  There are different levels of dubiousness.  Just like how there are different levels of high blood pressure, or high cholesterol, or different levels of being on the spectrum, or different degrees of crime.

The Latvian may be MORE DUBIOUS than Owen's Defense, but yes, they are both dubious, as are the Fajarowicz, 5...Nxd5 in the 4.Ng5 Two Knights, the St. George Defense, the Elshad System (both the one for Black and the one for White), and the Closed Benoni (not to be confused with the Czech Benoni), along with numerous others and the list is way too long to spell them all out.

people still play correspondence?

I dont care who plays the Latvian, 1.e4 e5 2.nf3 f5 3.nxe5 qf6 and houdini 11 at depth 47 has the position at 1.84. something like this shoudnt be uttered in the same sentence as Owen's defense.

what does dubious mean? that it takes longer to equalize? you also tend to conveniently put Owen in the bottom list, whereas you put the Nimzowitsch defense closer to the 2nd tier and i see no reason why. 1.b6 is closer to 1.nc6 in terms of soundness than 1.a6.

show me a line that's dubious.