Sicilian for beginners

Hey everyone, 

I need some advice. I've been playing the Sicilian in response to e4. Typically, when I can, I try to play the dragon becuase chess.com has a tournment coming up for that variation. 

I'm a beginner, so I end up with the same problem often. When I play c5 followed by ...d6 at some point or perhaps even e6 when I need to I find that I dont know how to manage space on the board. 

 I'm told this the Siclian is a technical opening and not a good idea for beginners. I've been advised to play the Scandianvivan or the French or even just respond with the Kings pawn game. 

However, I would like to keep trying the Sicilian becuase it seems to be favoured by masters and yet I don't want to dismiss the advice that I should learn other openings first. 

So I have the following questions:

1. How can a beginner learn to create more space after responding with c5?
2. Why is it better to learn those other openings first?
3. Does anyone know a good Chess Mentor course, video or other tool on this site that can help me learn this?
4. Finally, playing white what is the best response to c5 for a beginner? 

Sicilian is fine for beginners.

Marxism isn't.

a beginner should always be guided by "principles".......such as don't move the same piece more than once in the opening ( unless u are recapturing something or taking advantage of a situation ), always look to gain ground in the Center and prevent your opponent from doing same, try to castle early.

Memorizing actual opening moves is not good, until you have a firmer grasp on opening, middlegame and endgame principles.   Afterall if your opponent deviates from "book moves", how do you respond ?   Should be based on what you know of general principles........

above is just a start to get you good basics.

Yes I have studied and memorized opening principles from the studyguide on this site. Maybe I'm not applying it properly. I tend to grant my opponent too much space. Particularly with pawns.

It's good to note that not everyone thinks the Sicilian is a bad idea for beginners. I think I'll stick to it and redouble by efforts in not giving too much space while developing my pieces.

I didn't want to give up on the Sicilian because I know it's known to be a great response to e4. Why leave it only to come back to it later!

Ghost, I'm good with explaining Marxism to beginners 😉

You shouldn't play any opening just because it is favoured by masters. There are openings which are good for masters but bad for beginner/immediate players and there are openings which are good for beginner/intermediate players but are bad for masters. (And of course there are openings that are good regardless of level)

The sicilian defense is just too complicated, you should first play classical stuff. (Answer e4 with e5 and d4 with d5, follow opening principles and try to avoid blunders) After that, you can start to play some other openings.
The problem with the sicilian defense is that you give huge activity for white who has many ways to attack your king with it, while you get the center pawn majority and counter chances if you survive whites attack. Of course the stronger you are, the better you can use the advantages you get trom the sicilian defense.


 

Bump ^

In response to the OP, the solution is simple:

1) The Sicilian is too theoretical for a player who is a beginner.  They shouldn't be studying openings in the first place, just opening concepts, which are best understood by double kingpawn and double queenpawn openings because they follow the basic concepts to the letter.  Semi-Open and Semi-Closed openings, like the Sicilian, Grunfeld, etc, require a lot of thinking outside the box and deep theoretical knowledge.  Not a good idea until you can get your over the board rating to be over 1800.

2) Who ever said that the Sicilian was favored by masters????  It varies from master to master!

• Anatoli Karpov spent most of his life playing 1...e5 (going for the Zaitsev Variation of the Ruy Lopez) and 1...c6 (Caro-Kann)
• Nigel Short, Igor Glek, Wolfgang Uhlmann, and Victor Korchnoi all spent most of their life playing the French against 1.e4
• Kramnik played 1...e5 for the longest time, and then went thru a brief stint of the Pirc
• Anand, Carlsen, and others have predominantly used 1...e5 (intending 2...Nc6) as their main defense to 1.e4
• Yussupov was an avid Petroff player (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nf6)

So just because one world champion that was world champion for a full 15 years played the Sicilian, causing a spike in popularity, doesn't mean it's "the opening" that masters play.

Let's look at the main line of the Sicilian, as seen above.

White has a couple of advantages here:

• He has very easy development
• He has more space.
• He has a small advantage in development (at least for now.

This last one does not count that much because white has no way to use it in this specific position

Black also has several advantages:

• The open c-file
• Two pawns in the center against one.

Both sides will try to use these advantages.

White usually gains some space on the kingside and attacks there, and black (due to his open c-file) attacks on the queenside.

I hope this helps.

a friend new to chess got annoyed by me beating him and rightly so ,so he studied the sicilian even tho hed only been playing for a few months and boy did he study ,

eventually he was swatting me aside with ease to the point i went out to court Mistress Sicilian myself and she is a fine woman if you get her just right but cruel if you misplace 1 step of her dance

he went on to play competitively in otb and even got a draw v a GM in a simul

Hope you enjoy the affair with mistress sicilian marx is right

Complaining about lack of space in the Sicilian is equivalent to complaining about a machine gun making noise.