Suggest a good defense

To be honest, I'm not good in memorizing all the basic openings.

When I first started playing chess, my mentors always tells me to starts off with either d4 or e4 as white and to play Sicilian or French as black. After you have understands those opening lines pretty well, only then going for English, etc...

My Mentor was Mok Tze Meng, (now currently one of Malaysian top chess players) & Grasie Gunong, (he liked to play fancy chess games and at one time even lost to me even though I just started to pick up chess). During those crazy age, we used to analyse our just concluded games until early morning.

I guess. the keyword is, "Jack of all trade BUT master of none is as good as nothing".

Always remember that you don't have a computer brain and your thinking always have some limitations.

I used to be a passive chess player. I will get my defense well organized before I started to look for my opponent's weakness and starts to take advantage of the situation. Always remember that getting adventurous and going for early offensive when your pieces are not well developed or your defense are not well organized will always ends up in trouble.

These are the very basics that most chess enthusiasts nowadays fails to develop. They likes quick junk food like KFC rather than preparing/cooking their own food. If you have gone through all these basics, I don't see any difficulty for you to achieve OTB ratings of 1700 and above.

I'm not sure why people believe the Scandinavian is unsound.  Kramnick played it exclusively in the World Blitz Championship in Moscow last year and placed 4th.  Gashimov trotted it out a few times in the same tournament and won 3 out 4 times with it.  I have to believe those guys wouldn't be fooling around with something unsound.  Black does lose a tempo early, but white gives the tempo back in the middle game.  Play the Qd6 line.  There's a pretty good 2 part video of the opening here on Chess.com.

hi. i have tried to play both caro-kann and french with my friend. somehow i lost my all games when i played caro-kann-i just could not attack and was defending all the time- while results were quite satisfying while i played with french defence as i had attacking chances also in the begning itself but as soon as i stated playing the sicilian-dragon variation- he just could not handle it and almost lost all the times. so for me sicilian is best defense for e4. thx

I guess that it is because when thinking about the Scandinavian, most of the people still think of the Qa5 variant, nowadays somehow old-fashioned (yet still playable). That's why I specified the Qd6 variant. It's a pretty sharp defense. It depends if you choose to play the 5...a6 variant (sharper and more agressive) or the 5...c6 (more solid and quitter).

Both of them good defenses. I've also played the 2...Nf6 variant, and it's really interesting. Mainly when white tries to hold onto the extra pawn with 3.c4, and black replies with the Icelandic gambit 3...e6!

Regards.

no oppening is easy to master.. the most agressive ones are probably the sicillians (najdorf, dargon, svechnikov, schveningen, all of them), but every sharp oppening requires hell of a lot of time to learn properly

I love playing against scandinavian. Easy wins.

I've also crushed a bunch of white players playing the Scandinavian Qd6 thinking they were gonna win easily