1.b3 is also called the LARSEN opening. It also came  to the limelight  due to a celebrated of Spasski , who played with Black pieces, against Larsen.

I personally like 1.b3 much more than 1.b4.

This could be a nice theme for a new thread.

i still like b4 better then b3 even if its worse, i still would rather play e4,d4 or c4

how does 1.b4 constitue 14 pages of discussion? will this be the new parham?

nah, the white queen is still stuck in.

2-3 are pages of discussion that agree unanimously that it's bad, not losing, but still bad, and the rest is trolling.

You are not able to differentiate Irontiger.
Those who give variants are not trolls. And those are more than 3 pages.

Calling an opening where Black does not have more than 0.18 plus, according to engines, bad, is funny.
I wonder what your OtB rating is.

See one of the problems ? (hint : bold letters)

Even if the computer held the Truth (tm), the fact that any first white move draws with hypothetical best play is not relevant. There is a difference between the starting position and a K+B vs K+B endgame. The fact that White has an easier game than Black after standard openings, and Black an easier game than White after 1.b4, is enough to call that opening bad.

My OTB rating ? It looks like a personal attack. It has absolutely no impact on the value of my arguments (again, authority argument is not an argument).

And I'm pretty confident the posts with variants fill less than three full pages, even if they are spread over more than 3 pages. Trolling started on page 1.

There is nothing wrong with b4. I play it often and it leads to very interesting games. You have to be committed to a queenside flank attack while parrying a center thrust from black. You also fianchetto both bishops and aim to control the white diagonal. When you do, you get a crushing victory and often a significant advantage in the end game.

yes, it's boring games we want to see.

Oh, yes it is. It is important to have a rich middlegame with plenty of ideas.

So in conclusion we don't want to play 1.b4 because we do not want interesting games and we want to give away our opening advantage on move 2 instead of move 1.

yeah right, lol. Lets finish this thread, it is now like some old teachers fight each other. 

Well, since going off-topic is fashionable here...

Ivanchuk is well loved by chess fans because he plays interesting chess. He has just about no chance of ever playing for the world championship though.

Boris Spassky once played 1.Nf3 Nf6 2.g3 b5 in a world championship match against Tigran Petrosian, so it's entirely possible that we will see 1.b4 even in a World Championship match. But I doubt we will ever see a +2700 player use 1.b4 as his or her main weapon.

But for players below 2500, even in correspondence chess, it seems playable enough. FirebrandX claims that someone has lost 5 ICCF games as white using 1.b4. He didn't say how many games that same player had won against similar competition in ICCF.

lets see how Ivantchuk will stand up after this loss against Radiabov.
I think we all wish him well.

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About 1.Nf3 Nf6, 2.g3 b5.lack

b5 is justified, because a move e3 would g3 make one of the two moves , g3 or e3, superfluous.

The question is, what is more severe, the gain of space for black or the weakening of his queenside after an a4.