Ok, but you’re completely ignoring my point on the Keres by not giving concrete lines showing the Scheveningen being OK against the Keres. I want to see your lines that prove that Black is fine against the Keres.
What do you mean give you concrete lines? There are no concrete lines because Black isn't in trouble. 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. If you think you have something then you can easily find the answer to it by searching a database, a book or maybe computer analysis. Don't ask other people to do work for your imaginary attacks unless you pay them.
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.
I notice you play the dragon yourself, which is played at a similar frequency to the Scheveningen at super gm level, and the results it does get at that level are abysmal, even Carlsen struggled to get results from it.
How about you try to put lines where the Kere's supposedly has an incredible attack, you're the one trying to overturn the whole of opening theory. You're asking me to post lines to imaginary attacks here.
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.
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. 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. 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.
And yes - part of the reason it can be a good idea is due to its rarity. Chess has a kind of natural ecology and balance where the rarer openings can survive on any level despite not being the absolute mainlines. If everyone had to play the Najdorf and Scheveningen the same amount sure, the Najdorf would probably have a little better results. That goes for every opening, it's an inherent part of chess. Only complete amateurs try to memorize the most main line to every opening, that is too predictable, the only good player that ever used to do that was Weaver Adams and it was mostly just his gimmick. That doesn't make it a "surprise opening", just one of the lesser used ones.
See the statistics from my previous post to see why. Additionally, it is not only played FAR less than the Najdorf, it is the least played mainline in the Sicilian at the IM/GM levels. Does that mean it is unplayable? Of course not. However, the reason it is not anyone's main weapon is due to the Keres Attack. If everyone knew you were going to play the Scheveningen, they would prepare the Keres Attack against you every single game, and Black's results are very bad in that line.
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.
The King's Gambit is not refuted; rather, it has basically been worked out to a draw. In other words, if it were your main weapon, Black would simply need to knock out ~35 moves of theory and shake hands.
That's basically what refuted means - a draw.
I could have sworn you had "Caro-Kann" in there before I clicked quote, but just in case:
The Caro-Kann was played 2414 times in 2019 at the IM/GM levels. White won 33.1%, drew 42.2%, and lost 24.8%. It is played quite often at that level. It has not been in fashion at the World Championship level recently, but that is due to fashion, not so much results.
The Pirc was played 650 times in 2019 at the IM/GM levels (with very similar results: White won 35.3%, drew 37.5%, lost 27.2%).
The Pirc was played more than 6x the amount of the Scheveningen last year. The Caro-Kann more than 25x.
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.
While I agree that lines can go in and out of fashion, the main reason masters do not play the Scheveningen against other masters very often is to avoid getting into a sharp theoretical battle with the Keres Attack (where White's attack is straight-forward and easy to play while Black's defense rests on the edge of a razor blade!)
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.
While the Pirc and Caro-Kann have "tiny theoretical" edges for White, the Keres Attack is more than just a "tiny" advantage.
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.
If you look at it with engines, you see Lc0 evaluating the position after 6. g4 at +0.75-1.00 (strong edge for White!), and SF 11 evaluates it at anywhere from +0.50-0.70 depending on the depth you let it go to (again, strong edge for White). Granted, those are engine lines, but if you look deeper into it, you'll see that on every move, White has 2-3 good options and Black only has 1 option - and this goes on for the next 8-10 moves. This is why players tend to avoid it: practically, it favors White.
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 ****.
His post was a bit hyperbolic, but not at all foolish. If you want to play the Scheveningen structure, the better way to do it is to go into it via the Najdorf move order. Which is what Kasparov did for all but 2 games in his career.
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.
So...A lot of words, some good points, but yet one problem...you are still refusing (albeit cleverly) to show me actual moves that Black can play against the Keres to reach a good position. Ok, I’ll start if u won’t. After 6. g4, Black has 5 moves: the dubious 6...e5 and the also dubious 6...Nc6 which both lead to bad positions for the second player. 6...a6 is better than them but still fails to hold back the g-pawn and leads to a nice edge for White, and that is if Black plays extremely precisely to avoid losing outright early. 6....Be7 will simply transpose to either the Nc6 or a6 lines, which are not so good for Black. Finally, we have to address Black’s only decent move 6...h6, restraining the pawn. White should press on with h4 provided they want to play a true Keres (h3 leading to a good h3 Najdorf for White is also good) Now Black can play a6, Be7, e5, or Nc6, the main line. The first two simply allow Qf3 followed by g5, leading to at a minimum an edge for White. e5 is better but still allows White to get an edge with Nf5. The final move Nc6 is the main move. White normally plays Rg1, threatening g5, forcing Black to take immediate action. Negi gives three moves for Black: Nd7, h5, and d5, the main move. The first two allow White to gain a fairly large advantage, much like the advantage White gets if Black allows g5 without doing anything (ex:a6). d5 is Black’s best, leading to two types of positions. The first kind are crazy attacking positions, but ones where White retains better chances. The second are queenless endings, but ones where White presses due to their better pieces and pawn structure. If you aren’t convinced, I can give more lines upon request, or you could get Negi’s book and try to refute it. Also, if you want me to give concrete lines that show me the Dragon is fine, I can and will, which is what I think you should do when debating an opening.
You're obviously looking at an anomaly, probably you're not choosing enough games. I already told you you can go screw your statistics that you're just fishing out of god knows where with the intention of choosing the ones to support your argument. If you think I'm going to play this circle jerk game you're dreaming. 
) we want.
Ok, but you’re completely ignoring my point on the Keres by not giving concrete lines showing the Scheveningen being OK against the Keres. I want to see your lines that prove that Black is fine against the Keres.
What do you mean give you concrete lines? There are no concrete lines because Black isn't in trouble. 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. If you think you have something then you can easily find the answer to it by searching a database, a book or maybe computer analysis. Don't ask other people to do work for your imaginary attacks unless you pay them.
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.
I notice you play the dragon yourself, which is played at a similar frequency to the Scheveningen at super gm level, and the results it does get at that level are abysmal, even Carlsen struggled to get results from it.
How about you try to put lines where the Kere's supposedly has an incredible attack, you're the one trying to overturn the whole of opening theory. You're asking me to post lines to imaginary attacks here.
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.
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. 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. 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.
And yes - part of the reason it can be a good idea is due to its rarity. Chess has a kind of natural ecology and balance where the rarer openings can survive on any level despite not being the absolute mainlines. If everyone had to play the Najdorf and Scheveningen the same amount sure, the Najdorf would probably have a little better results. That goes for every opening, it's an inherent part of chess. Only complete amateurs try to memorize the most main line to every opening, that is too predictable, the only good player that ever used to do that was Weaver Adams and it was mostly just his gimmick. That doesn't make it a "surprise opening", just one of the lesser used ones.
See the statistics from my previous post to see why. Additionally, it is not only played FAR less than the Najdorf, it is the least played mainline in the Sicilian at the IM/GM levels. Does that mean it is unplayable? Of course not. However, the reason it is not anyone's main weapon is due to the Keres Attack. If everyone knew you were going to play the Scheveningen, they would prepare the Keres Attack against you every single game, and Black's results are very bad in that line.
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.
The King's Gambit is not refuted; rather, it has basically been worked out to a draw. In other words, if it were your main weapon, Black would simply need to knock out ~35 moves of theory and shake hands.
That's basically what refuted means - a draw.
I could have sworn you had "Caro-Kann" in there before I clicked quote, but just in case:
The Caro-Kann was played 2414 times in 2019 at the IM/GM levels. White won 33.1%, drew 42.2%, and lost 24.8%. It is played quite often at that level. It has not been in fashion at the World Championship level recently, but that is due to fashion, not so much results.
The Pirc was played 650 times in 2019 at the IM/GM levels (with very similar results: White won 35.3%, drew 37.5%, lost 27.2%).
The Pirc was played more than 6x the amount of the Scheveningen last year. The Caro-Kann more than 25x.
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.
While I agree that lines can go in and out of fashion, the main reason masters do not play the Scheveningen against other masters very often is to avoid getting into a sharp theoretical battle with the Keres Attack (where White's attack is straight-forward and easy to play while Black's defense rests on the edge of a razor blade!)
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.
While the Pirc and Caro-Kann have "tiny theoretical" edges for White, the Keres Attack is more than just a "tiny" advantage.
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.
If you look at it with engines, you see Lc0 evaluating the position after 6. g4 at +0.75-1.00 (strong edge for White!), and SF 11 evaluates it at anywhere from +0.50-0.70 depending on the depth you let it go to (again, strong edge for White). Granted, those are engine lines, but if you look deeper into it, you'll see that on every move, White has 2-3 good options and Black only has 1 option - and this goes on for the next 8-10 moves. This is why players tend to avoid it: practically, it favors White.
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 ****.
His post was a bit hyperbolic, but not at all foolish. If you want to play the Scheveningen structure, the better way to do it is to go into it via the Najdorf move order. Which is what Kasparov did for all but 2 games in his career.
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.