Modern Defence vs Pirc Defence

The truth is, engines themselves ARE USELESS in the Opening and the Endgame!

An engine can sit there for an hour and it will tell you that KRN vs KR is plus 3.  It is never plus 3.  If there is an immediate fork or skewer, it is plus a bajillion.  If not, it is triple zero!

Engines need powerbooks for the opening and table bases for the endgame.  Otherwise, they are useless in those two phases of the game.  They are best in the middlegame as a whole and calculating tactics to win material in the case of blunders in the opening or endgame.

For example, after 1.d4 g6 2.Bg5 c6 3.e3??, it will see 3...Qa5+, but that is tactics, not opening evaluation.

now you are changing the topic to endgame evals which are an entirely different animal

the reason top players use engines for opening novelties extensively is proof that this sentiment is nonsense. Engines have radically changed how we evaluate openings of the past and introduce great novelties otherwise looked over by humans. That we cant expect engines to solve decades of human opening research in the time it takes to finish your coffee is not a valid critique of anything.

and like i said before CLOUD ENGINES. we dont need to rely on the number crunching of our device anymore. Now very high depth analysis of openings is borrowed from engines that have done the heavy lifting for us, and the result of HUMANS playing around with said evals and drilling in deeper yields newer evals also saved in the cloud. This isnt 2005 anymore.

luckily for us, centaur chess is still showing that engines assisted by strong human players are still superior to pure engine play

Read the whole post.  I mention both openings and endgames because the engine sux at both.

An engine needs a Powerbook to evaluate and play an opening properly!

The engine alone CANNOT DO IT!

ever heard of alphazero?

Yes I have heard of it.  But it is not on the market.  At least I have yet to see it sold anywhere accessible to the U.S.  Amazon, Chess4Less, etc.

THE POINT is that very strong engines dont "need" opening books to analyze and  play openings well. There is nothing inherent in silicon machines  that doent allow them to do that.

The reason conventional engines are rarely left entirely on their own devices is a matter of resources, you cant compare the collective experience of decades of opening research to a cursory look of an engine from the starting position. Humans have had 300 years of collective experience to have a say with some authority on this!But engines are at the forefront of finding opening novelties at an alarming rate.

alphazero is just so strong with its neural network methods of pruning that it virtually imitates the historical trial and error of humans in its own way 

Looks like you are about 2 years out of knowledge on engine news!

Current Leela running on TCEC and chess.com computer championis about 4 times bigger network than Alpha Zero, and it is estimated minimum of +70 elo stronger now (depending on time control) .  (Leela reached Alpha Zero level in 2019 Feb -2019 April .) . Beyond that point 2019, Leela programmers introduced various better training methods that were not available for Alpha Zero in 2017..If you ask in Leela discord, majority of testers can prove with their reasonable testing methods. 

Its a graveyard....there are more and more people playing d4 hoping to catch some sucker playing KID.

The Pirc is not played at the top level!

The last time it was, back in 1999, it got smashed and is now known as Kasparov's Immortal game!

Even the Scandinavian was used in the World Championship (1995).  Find me a Pirc in a World Championship match!

modern is more flexible but its actually a headache to play well. A lot of the many different plans black has, there is usually some white line specifically designed to stop or at least heavily dissuade you from playing your formation of choice. They are also a lot of lines where black must know very subtle nuances in move order just not to end up in a bad spot.Pirc is still fairly theory heavy if you want to play it at a higher level but far more straightforward by comparison and linear.

I have personally never liked either. They are not particularly trappy and dont have too much surprise value and take a lot of homework to get away with past a certain level. White also has too many setups which let him dictate the game and still have a decent advantage. Other secondary defenses at least force white to make committal moves before you get the "critical" lines. 

If I play this kind of stuff, I want to be non committal and flexible. So, modern with ...a6. In particular, I like to wait before I commit my King's Knight.

Why do people act as if chess was actually solved? In spite of the progress made, we still have only scratched the top of the absolutely huge tree graph of the game.

My claims are not absurd.

It has been well established for decades at the top level that 1...e5, The Sicilian, The French, and the Caro-Kann are better defenses to 1.e4 than the other 16 options.

Now what would be absurd would be if I started to try and cherry pick some reason why one is better than the other three!  Black plays any one of those 4 moves and you will get no argument from me (at least no argument about move 1).

"The Pirc is not played at the top level!" 

I agree that it will never be as popular as the Sicilian or 1...e5.

But one just can't say that. 

Anand, Carlsen, MVL played it, and we can also mention players from other times such as Botvinnik, Timman, Tal, Korchnoi, Nunn, Gulko or Seirawan. Even Fischer played it once (not during an exhibition game, but against Spassky in Iceland!!). 

You think he should come back so that you can continue insulting him for no particular reason?

I have played the Latvian!  Saying a GM has played it means little.

How many GMs do you know of that call the Pirc their primary defense to 1.e4?  I would have to research his games, but possibly John Nunn.  And possibly Jon Speelman for the Modern.  They are few and far between, and for good reason!

It is a surprise weapon at best, like the Scandinavian was in 1995, round 14.

You could have said "the Pirc is not popular at the top level". And objectively, it would have been quite true. But you said "is not played", and this is completely different.

While chess.com's database has 31 000 games for the Scandinavian, it has approximately 60 000 games for 

the Pirc (main line on move 3) and the Modern.

I think that if the Pirc/Modern defense is only a surprise weapon, it is the king of the surprise weapons.

The database has 27 000 games for the Alekhine, and 7 000 for the Owen defense. 

How can it be the king  of the surprise weapons when it offers no surprises? white can develop at leisure with his system of choice and mantain first  move advantage. Its a respectable defense and leads to interesting positions but king of the surprise weapons is a bit much

one thing that gets lost or never mentioned in opening discussions is that its not mere objectivity that gives ranking to all the defenses,its flexibility of choices. In the big 4 defenses, black has choice and deviations galore which means white cant force you to narrow avenues if he is inclined , and many are playable. the playable non-4 defenses are a lot more narrow in their scope agaisnt critical lines and white can force black to play in a narrow bridge of few choices and sometimes even force continuations if black is to remain in the tolerably worse.

This is important because its much easier to prepare agaisnt someone if you dont have to study sideline upon sideline of options, Top players dont want repertoire's where they can be prepared agaisnt so easily. To argue that an opening has no top adherents as a primary defense misses this, its flexibility and not necessarily objectivity why this is often the deciding factor

Among not just super GMs but even IM's you will very rarely see a secondary opening or  defense as a primary weapon for this reason. You become too easy to prepare agaisnt, and thats an uphill battle. But if you like 5 different things with sidelines sprinkled in, your opponent must either play chess normally, or go through encyclopediac amounts of opening prep over someone's personal repertoire to have the same effect.