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

The assessment I've given of that position is not some mere subjective impression, as I've pointed out 5 or 6 times, it's fundamentally a reading of the database stats of rapid / blitz games at 2200+... Furthermore, the extent of your analysis was basically "here's the engine move" which 3% of high elo players actually play there, then insisting "no this is so obvious! durr". So far that's been... about the extent of your expert analysis.

It was right about time that you defaulted to your usual appeal to authority, or some analogue thereof. I think you've done this in every debate I've had with you, but only after you lose the debate. Cuz it's not a very good way of arguing, and you're aware of that, so you save it for the end as a last resort.

And what other strategy games have you played, btw? Since you're presuming to comment on how strategic thinking in one game won't translate to another. (but what other explanation do you have for me dominating you in debates about chess so easily? Lack of intelligence? And you're not even sure what games we're talking about, it's an asinine claim you're making). And what level did you reach?

wat debate bro, playing chess is a skill, knowing how to properly extract info from a database is a skill. You have neither. It's that simple.

There is no debate, ask any master level player what they think of your opening suggestion in diagram 1 and they will laugh. ITs a terrible move. maybe at your level, people will fall for the bxg2 trap, but losing most of your first move advantage for a 2nd rate trap is not good chess. playing this way hoping to catch people on a trap is not how you become a become a better player either. 
argument from an authority is only a fallacy when the authority alone replaces the argument, otherwise, we call it expert opinion.

no wonder pfren gave up on you fools lol. Here is a player outranking you by like 700 points explaining carefully to you whats going on, and you think an amateur use of database invalidates my point lol. Get a 2nd opinion from another master for diagram 1 and find me any that would say playing this way is a good idea. The most you would get is, "its not worse for white" which is obviously true, thats the privilege you get for playing subpar with white. It takes far more to be plain worse, especially agaisnt a secondary defense that takes longer to equalize.

ITs not a debate because you are not my chess peer, plain and simple. The chasm between us is vast. our levels of understanding the game exist at 2 different spheres and the lower player who never been much higher cannot fully grasp that.

Everything you said about surprise value and the meta and all these justifications are reasonable and true, but at your level you cant as a practical limitation recognize the difference between an objective !? and a ?!. To you an amateurs trap is a "practical weapon".

When it comes to reading a chart of the moves 2200+ players make in a position, which is all that's required to assess whether the claims you're making are true, this is actually not very difficult. Though for you it seems to be. I've given plenty more rationale, but to refute your nothing argument, this is actually all we need to do. I'll break it down for you in some simple steps:

1) Pull up the position in question. Set the filters to 2200+ elo, and rapid / blitz time format.

2) Find the line at which the engine move 5... d6, the one you're concerned about, is located. 
3) notice this move is played 3% of the time. It was played once out of 32 games.
3b) Realize this means it's not that big of a problem. 
4) Find the line at which the move 5... Bxg2, the move you claim will never happen, is located. 
5) notice this move is played 56% of the time and is the most common move. 
5b) Realize this fact completely shreds your point, literally it wads it up / wipes with it and throws it in the bin.

Now I'm going to do an advanced analysis... I'm going to highlight in red the moves that are bad for us, yellow the moves that are so-so, and green the moves that are great for us. Ok? This is next level stuff so just pay attention.

There you have it, folks. Admittedly this is an expert level technique and one I've refined over many years, but it's something that I am proud of and I wanted to share it.

1. 18 games falling for your trap, repeat after me, 18! very bad sample size
2. NO OTB MASTER GAMES, Zero. Not a single player has considered your novelty worth playing since at least 1952

This can be settled with a simple question, Do you see any player above 2000 FIDE playing bxg2 in any serious time format? if the answer is no, this is already settled, this is a one trick pony that throws away your opening advantage if spotted. Advanced players have a name for that. A BAD MOVE.
seriously, what kind of moron uses a database of blitz and rapid games with a sample size close to the single digits to draw opening conclusions???

if you cant calculate from a good glance that bxg2 qg4 is winning for white, you are not a strong player period. That 20 people playing in a very fast format played careless and said yum to the g pawn hanging invalidates nothing.

dunce, they are 2200+ players, I can show you that part of the chart too if you like, they are strong players... it is a new engine line that is anti-positional, and so we would not expert it to be in the masters database. This point has already been made, you had an opportunity to respond to it then, you didn't and now here I am repeating it again... This is your "expert analysis", failing to follow the conversation on a basic level - it's why I don't take you seriously.
You keep portraying this as a trap (it's not a trap, it's a prolonged continuation), but the main goal is to get out of prep, even if they respond Ne7 - which most don't - I've achieved that. And you have said pretty much nothing about this aspect. What I suspect you would recommend a player do is walk right into your prep. Because you don't actually look at the game from a practical standpoint for white, you look at it from your own idealistic standpoint. You have blinders on.

your first diagram position (the only one we are talking about right now, not nd2) is not an engine line because it is not a top move or even close to it. The top engine move in that position is either, nge2, qe2 or the unseen nh3. e5 there is not a top 5 move.
you are not even getting your opening positions straight lol. You woudnt even be right if we were talking about nd2 because they are 32 ACTUAL master games from that position.

Oh it's definitely an engine line, it's the 5th highest scoring move according to leela in that position. Now, granted the score decreases as leela drills in further. But this is another mistake you so often commit when you do analysis - you analyze lines at too high of a depth. Sometimes I actually search for moves at limited depths specifically because I realize I'm not going to play a rare, obscure position precisely for 17 moves, that's just not the way this works. 
As much as you talk about understanding how to read a database table / analyze the opening you are so consistently wrong aren't you?

Leela is a neural net, it's not an older engine.... infact, if you knew anything about how neural nets work, they often use a shallower search depth. Like there's a neural net Mia that you actually set its search depth to 1 and it'll play you at a 2000 elo level. That's due to the way neural nets work, they're a highly calibrated systems of weighs essentially, you can think of it more of like a chess intuition and less of like a algorithmic crack of the position. But yes, there are plenty of moves that are perfectly playable which will show up at depth 12, depth 16, but by the time depth 20 rolls around... the engine no longer sees them. All kinds of gambits are like this - throughout the history of chess people have played lines like that which were risky, lines that brought the fight early... It's not a complicated concept, not even controversial honestly. For a buffoon such as yourself it causes you to spaz out, but it's really not that complicated.

CLOWN. im not even reading this buffonery to know

Asians tend to dominate most online strategy games these days... I played a game called Starcraft for a while. Like chess it was very competitive and popular, people around the world played it. The best players were always the Asians. It was no contest. The secret to their success, I reckon, was in their mindset... American players were very afraid to go outside the norms, they were the worst players. You hear so much about how America is an individualistic culture, but I'm not so sure. The Asians had the opposite approach... they seemed to find personal glory in playing dubious, some would say suicidal lines and yet winning. Facing them was something like fending off kamikaze planes as a battleship. Maybe it's the polytheism in their culture, they tend not to believe as much in one coherent set of rules the way Westerners do. In a strategy game where complexity is so high it might be an advantage.

It's conformist to such a degree people are cracking up mentally, they're so tightly wound. In the last decade we've been witnessing this cracking on a global scale... I think people are becoming tired though, and ambivalent... to where they lack the will to cling to their social ideals and they're becoming more able to act freely. I'm not entirely pessimistic, but there's still a long way to go.

You know this thread is interesting because I have always thought it should be reversed.

I have always thought Black should aim to get into Owen’s Defense using the French Move Order.

I have always thought play 1..e6 first.

Then playing 2…b6 second was the best way to play the Owen’s Defense.

After 1. e4 b6 2. d4 the choices 2... e6 vs. 2... Bb7 are actually about equal according to the engine. But it's interesting. I'm thinking of it more in terms of blacks repertoire against 1. d4. Black is gonna want to play b6 there too, and go into either an English defense, or his Owens lines.

if black plays 1. d4 e6 this tempts white into playing 2. c4, and it discourages 2. e4. White tends to avoid the french here since it's a mainline against 1. e4 and he's not an e4 player. This way black will face d4/c4 alot more often, some of the best lines in the English defense. You definitely want to reach these as often as possible. And you also retain the option of Bb5+ in some cases, depending on the line you want to play. In addition you have options of transposing into a QID or dutch in these lines.

On the other hand, if you play 1... b6 white responds with e4 or Nf3 much more often, which aren't your most favorable lines, and you don't have the good QID or dutch transpositions.

So I'd definitely want to play e6 > b6 against 1. d4.

But the caveat is white could respond e4, transposing into the french. 1. d4 e6 2. e4 b6. 
Which means... you'd rather play e6 / b6 against 1. e4 so that you're preparing for these same french lines you'll be facing against 1. d4.

Of course... that's the other thing, if you start with the french you can choose whether or not to go into your Owens lines, or play a french. So more flexibility = a good thing.

Concern about allowing c4 is no reason to avoid an early e6 since that's already part of your 1. d4 repertoire, at least it should be if you want something cohesive that limits the amount of theory you need.

So yeah I actually think I'd play... e6 > b6 against 1. d4, and against 1. e4... probably I'd play e6 > b6 there as well.

You know I haven’t really found a set up I enjoy against the Owen’s Defense.

I have faced it 15 times according to my statistics on different website.

67% Win rate

33% Lose rate

0% Draws

I have played a lot of different moves.

I don’t like d4 because I want the D pawn to help defend the e4 pawn.

I been trying set ups with d3.

I don’t like the main line set ups with Bd3.

The Bishop seems misplaced to me.

The above position for example.

I just don’t like it.

It does feel like you're walking right into someones trap playing such an odd early move like that. Which makes sense, because you are. Unless of course you play my secret sauce e5, the depths of which no one below FM is going to understand ; )

My point is it's a very niche position, the trap would be somewhere buried in the 25 years worth of prep that NMs such as dark have in the line vs. my literally blindly feeling my way through it 1 out of 100 games. It just seems like a fundamentally bad idea to even try to fight in those conditions.

Even just a positional mistake that leads to equality can be tricky and is something to be avoided. Unless of course it's followed up by a sharp continuation which I know and they don't. But the entire line feels like a "trap" in the sense I'm being led into someones prep, yes. Which I am... If I lose my objective edge at any point, even if we have equality... now I hate my position. 
I used to agree with you until I lost to Owens repeatedly. There's a reason people play Owens - do you think their decision is weak?
If I buckled down and deeply studied the main lines I could change my mind. Then again, I have so many other things to study in chess... things that are much higher priority. I'm not sure how realistic it is to think that way. At the same time I have to study Oracle database, the AWS cloud, I have to learn C#, the list goes on...
If you have an amazing memory where you can look through the lines in the database once and watch a few games, and basically remember everything about the position maybe you approach the issue differently than 99.999% of others. I think my memory is only in the top 99.7% and I find that I can't do that.

Against someone like dark I'd expect his prep to be 10-12 moves deep probably. 
They say fear is the beginning of wisdom, it's a philosophy I ascribe to but it's from the bible so probably you wouldn't take it seriously. 
I gotta go to work now - later.

The line which has highest win rate for me is the below line:

However, I don’t know if I want to continue with it or not.