There are a lot of typical plans from the starting position after 5..a6 and 6..e6. The main idea is that you want to develop quickly and prepare to push either e5 or d5 to break open the game (once your pieces are ready for it).
You can play 6..e5 or 6..e6 with perfectly fine games. I've played both, as did Kasparov and Fischer. Note that against some of White's 6th moves (e.g. Bc4, Bg5), you should not play 6..e5. 6..e6 is one good option in both cases. Nfd7 can often be a good alternative to delay the decision about what to do with the e-pawn for a move or two. There is an older Everyman book: "Play the Najdorf Scheveningen-Style" that you may want to look at. Keep in mind that some of the lines may not hold up to modern engine analysis, but the plans will largely be the same. Also note that when you play the Najdorf this way, you often will end up in a Hedgehog-like setup, so it will be useful to understand that structure. Sergey Shipov has 2 books on that structure that are well worth studying. And if you decide you want to play the Najdorf proper (that is, with 6..e5 when possible), the book "Opening Repertoire: The Sicilian Najdorf" that was released last year is very good.
As @FizzyBand and I have mentioned a couple times, you may also want to check out White's ideas. The Negi, Shaw, and de la Villa/Illingworth books are all excellent.
) we want.
What do you mean give you concrete lines? There are no concrete lines because Black isn't in trouble.
Black isn't in trouble? Funny how almost half the games played in the line were wins for White at the IM/GM level. At the very least, it is far more practical to play White than it is Black from the starting point.
What you're asking for is like asking for lines showing black is ok against the grob or ok against the yugoslav attack. A stupid request.
Black is virtually winning on move 2 against the Grob, and has some difficulties against the Yugoslav Attack. These are also well known.
Don't ask other people to do work for your imaginary attacks unless you pay them.
He wasn't asking you to do his work for him; he was asking you to justify your assertion, which is contrary to the conclusions made by theoretical experts on the line. That is, you made a claim "Black is fine", when theorists are saying "black has significant trouble here", and he asked "where do you see Black is fine?" That is asking YOU to do YOUR work.
Besides, there are all kinds of different ways to play and positional setups for the Scheveningen including against the Kere's, it's not like black has to play some super accurate narrow line - though of course he has to play accurately at times. It's not the sort of opening that there are many concrete lines for. Of course black has to play precisely at times which is why it's considered a dangerous opening.
This is simply complete nonsense. The road for White from the starting point of the pure Scheveningen is rather wide; the road for Black is very narrow. You can see that by looking at the databases, or looking at how the engines evaluate it.
The Keres Attack puts Black in a very defensive posture very early on.
Completely false, it's the exact opposite. The Kere's Attack is an initially sharp opening with great chances to attack for both sides. If played accurately at the higher levels it tends to turn into a positional opening, black is not on the defensive in any way.
PawnTsunami I can see by your attitude and the way you are producing a torrent of difficult claims at a time that you are looking for an argument and just going to use everything at your disposal to try to support your point, not trying to remain unbiased.
PawnTsunami wrote:
"When we published Experts vs the Sicilian in 2004, ..., and GM Viktor Gavrikov chose 6. g4 against the Scheveningen. Already then, but to a greater extent now, the Scheveningen has become a marginal opening - played so rarely that it has become a subection of the Najdorf in this book" - GM John Shaw, Playing 1. e4: Sicilian Main Lines
"The Keres Attack has long been regarded as one of the toughest challenges to the Scheveningen...." - GM Parimarjan Negi, 1. e4 vs The Sicilian III
"This is the 'pure' Scheveningen, which is under a cloud because of the Keres Attack" - GMs Jesus de la Villa and Max Illingworth, Dismantling the Sicilian
de la Villa and Illingworth go on to mention that Black's options are limited because if he allows g5, White has a "turbo-charged English Attack".
In short, you have the 3 most respected 1. e4 repertoires against the Sicilian all recommending the Keres Attack, and all concluding a strong edge for White.
Is this meant to be a joke?
Nothing any of them said there goes against anything I said whatsoever. I would also recommend the Kere's Attack against black. All they did is confirm exactly what I've been saying.
This is getting really getting out of hand at this point. I made a simple and obvious observation of a well known and obvious fact. If you still don't understand that's your problem. Please don't argue with me again because you'll just be wrong.
I can only assume you are trolling at this point, since you contradict your claim in paragraph 1, 2 paragraphs later and completely miss that the GMs I quoted are flat out telling you that your assertion is wrong.
It is really only used as a surprise weapon. Virtually no GMs use the Scheveningen as their main weapon.
lol - you could say the same thing about the d3 Ruy Lopez or many other highly critical openings.
I suppose you should tell Magnus to stop using one of his main weapons. And Svidler for that matter.
Your argument might be valid here if we were arguing is the Scheveningen the most theoretically critical opening. What YOU are trying to argue is that black is at some kind of inherent disadvantage which is false, especially under the GM level.
Apparently you do not understand. The claim that the Scheveningen has trouble because of the Keres Attack is known theory. It does not have to be "the most theoretically critical opening" to justify that claim. Just like the Yugoslav Attack is known to give the Dragon the most problems. In both cases, Black is forced into a defensive posture for quite a while. You can try to claim otherwise, but you would just be showing your lack of knowledge on the subject. I would suggest picking up Negi's 4-volume 1. e4 repertoire (3 of which are dedicated to Sicilian lines), Shaw's 3-volume 1. e4 repertoire (1.5 of which are dedicated to the Sicilian, and where he completely dismisses the pure Scheveningen because of its problems), and de la Villa/Hollingworth's book on facing the Sicilian lines.
The fact that you can get away with an opening at the class level does not make it theoretically sound. I know class A players who play the Grob as their main weapon. That doesn't make it a good opening.
The other way of putting your statement is that the Scheveningen is used as the literal main weapon of a few GMs and routinely by lots of others up to the very elite in the world.
That means it's a really GOOD. Black is not "on the defensive", black is not at a disadvantage other than the usual. Maybe a "surprise lite", noone is going to be that shocked to see a regularly played opening.
That is literally the exact opposite of what I said, and of what the database would show you.
Man, I don't like how you've put your statistics because you look like you're trying to bias them to making the Scheveningen look bad. I don't know why you can't just lay them out clearly. Why not just give a screenshot of your database.
Your numbers show that the Scheveningen is played almost as much as the Dragon, not that it's "far less". I was honestly surprised that the dragon is getting more play than the scheveningen, but saying it's by far more played than it is just plain wrong. 83 vs 129.
White doesn't even play the Kere's attack literally half the time which blows your other dogmatic claims that black's going to suffer badly from it away. Also you didn't give any statistics for when white didn't play the Kere's attack.
The statistics you posted against the Kere's are very healthy for black.
I didn't skew them. I just listed what was played last year at the IM/GM levels and the results. It isn't meant to make anything look bad, it was meant to give you some perspective. The Scheveningen is not the main weapon used by any IM/GM.
If you look at the games where White did not play the Keres Attack, Black fairs MUCH better:
1-0: 35.9%
1/2-1/2: 35.9%
0-1: 28.2%
And comparing it to the Dragon (which is the 2nd lowest played Sicilian mainline at the IM/GM level - due to a similar problem) is silly. You are literally saying "OMG, see! It is only slightly in last place!"
Just because not every White player knows, or wants to play for an all out attack, does not change the theoretical evaluation. I showed the statistics to demonstrate that it clearly has a practical, if not theoretical advantage.
And no, losing almost 50% of the time is not a healthy line for Black.
That's basically what refuted means - a draw.
Then Chess is refuted since with best play, the result is a draw.
That is, of course, not accurate. Refuted means "prove to be wrong". The King's Gambit is not refuted, but it has been analyzed out so far out that the result with best play is a draw. The same goes for lines like the Smith-Morra Gambit. GMs would play that as a surprise weapon to catch their opponent outside something that is fresh in their mind.
I did have Caro-Kann but edited it as on second thought I thought the Caro might have more. Those are interesting statistics for the amount played, I don't put much stock in the results since there are any number of reasons why the results might be better or worse for a particular opening, for example someone might play some openings against players rated better than them and some against people rated worse. Of course the Scheveningen is a move 5 move while those are move 2 moves, but fair enough that they're played a lot more.
The database I use is a filtered version of the Mega Database (where no players below 2300 are included). This means the games are only from ~1968, and only players at the FM/IM/GM level. These games are not between weak players. The pure Scheveningen is played MUCH more at the sub-master level, where Black has much better results. Those games are not theoretically important because of the number of blunders from both sides.
What?! I am not talking about the substantial advantage white has when I said tiny theoretical edge, I am talking about the tiny advantage of the Najdorf over the Scheveningen.
This shows you do not understand why Kasparov preferred the Najdorf move order to get into the Scheveningen: 5..a6 forces White to do something useful (usually develop a bishop) since g4 is not possible (it would just hang the pawn). This forces White to choose a plan. If they still want to go for the g4-push, it would be the English Attack, which while sharp, is a bit slower than the Keres Attack (giving Black better chances to defend).
White's attack is not easy to play at all - why do you think half of the players decided against the Kere's attack in the statistics you posted?
White gets a very unusual and complicated position quite quickly, where there is no easy way progress can be made. This is completely unlike the Yugoslav attack where white has several modes of attacking straightaway. You can't just assume it must be like other sharp openings.
Once again I appreciate the effort and agree when you say that the Kere's is a major reason why the Scheveningen is played a lot more. But when you say stuff like black is on the defensive or in a bad position it is obvious you have NO IDEA what you're talking about. Trust me dude, I have looked at the Kere's attack a LOT, I am not out here just talking about things I don't know about. I've gone through all the variations and all the positions. The Kere's attack is played positionally at high level, it's not a sharp opening at high levels.
Not everyone wants to go into a theoretical (i.e. memorization) battle. It is why some White players choose the Karpov Variation against the Najdorf instead of the English Attack or Ritcher-Rauzer.
The last paragraph above is simply nonsense.
Hahahahaha. Now I can see you're just clearly making **** up.
As I said I have gone through this. If you had went through the opening with a computer you would notice black has a ton of different plausible moves every step of the way. a6, d5, e5, Qa5, Qb6 and so on. You are literally thinking oh it must be like the Yugoslav Attack or KID or King's Gambit when it's not.
As meaningless as it is to compare computer evaluations with an opening, the Kere's Attack is literally 0.0 or thereabout when you go through it with a computer. Play through any of those lines longer than just 6. g4, there is no computer that is going to evaluate a Kere's Attack line as being good long-term for white because it's just equality.
You cannot seriously be suggesting that the Pirc and Caro Kan have better computer evaluations when just looking at them they have +0.6 to +1.0 evaluations all over the place. Don't talk ****.
Yep, I, and every theorist in the last 10 years (and I'm not even among them BTW) have just "made [stuff] up" and you, in your infinite wisdom are smart enough to see through it.
Seriously though, try actually doing the research. The top moves played after 6. g4: h6, a6, Nc6, e5, Be7, d5, Nfd7, g6.
h6 is the only move that doesn't give White a very strong edge (which is why it is by far the most popular reply). After h6, White has 6 replies that all leave him with a strong edge. 3 of them will transpose after a few moves, but there are move order tricks Black has to avoid with each one. And then Black has to resign himself to the fact that his king is likely going to be in the center the whole game (because castling long would be suicide and castling short would be castling into the attack).
And yes, anyone who is familiar with the English Attack will find the Keres Attack straight-forward. Black's position is very difficult to play, which is why the results are so skewed at the highest levels.
Oh man.... this just goes to show how unreliable and confabulating you are. Kasparov played the Scheveningen all the time before his match with Karpov. I thought you might be thinking of that he only played it twice in his match with Karpov but then I found he played several more of them in that match as well.
https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?page=1&pid=15940&playercomp=black&eco=B80-B85&title=Garry%20Kasparov%20playing%20the%20Sicilian%20Scheveningen%20as%20Black
These results include the Najdorf move order so you have to click on them to check if he is using the Scheveningen - in the early games he plays generally use the Scheveningen move order. Also you can see "Kere's attack" listed after some of them (even though he played other ones without the kere's attack, about half of white wouldn't use it according to your statistics), and he still played it 1996, 1998, 1999, 2002... so this is Kasparov, the man notorious for giving up the Scheveningen and still using it.
That other guy's post was also as I said it was. I am really disappointed at myself how I got sucked into wasting a lot of time going through this bs nonsense today, don't expect me to come back again.
You really REALLY should look at the games before you try to make the claim. If you look at the games, you will see that in all but 2, he goes into the Scheveningen from a Najdorf move order (i.e. 5..a6 6..e6). You need to do more research. Have a good day.