why the philidor?

I am wondering what are the stratagies with the phlidor, most players I faced who used it I have crused and most lines in databases have a 70% or higher win rate for white.

I have one example of a game played, it is in the diagram attached.

that Bg4? line is just a blunder, it gets crushed every time..

but youre right, do to the philidors passiveness in most lines the score isnt that good. blacks goal is to equalize before doing anything else, which might be why its not super popular anymore. when its done at a higher level they start with a different move order

The philidor does seem to be inferior to 2... Nc6 for example despite it being playable. I think it's for solid players who want to slowly improve their position, play to equalize, and maybe hope that white gets impatient? Since the play is often less sharp than in many possible lines with 2...Nc6, there may be a better chance for that, at least at amateur level.

If you don't know what you're doing as black in the philidor, though, you will probably just get crushed.

I don't think anybody who plays the philidor has some sort of deep strategy behind it, it seems they see the pawn is attacked and just want to protect it. They just happen to choose the weakest way of doing so. I wouldn't expect seeing the philidor other than when playing against beginners. I don't see a reason for a non-beginner to play it other than a strong desire to pull their opponent out of book.

yeah, and even then when theyre "out of book" theres natural and easy moves to find to beat it... d4,Nc3,Bc4,0-0..  and because black never really threatens much you likely can get the setup every time.

That game took 7 moves to diverge from the Opera game!

I'm afraid this simply isn't true. It happens that reasonable players really do play the Philidor on purpose.

It has been a while since I have seen a GM game played with a Philidor- It has the same reputation as the French. It hasen't been refuted it's just that there are much better options for black... 

I think the french has a much better reputation than the philidor. French is played regularly at the highest level, I mean, the very highest (Topalov vs Kamsky semi final match). And black is very much OK with the french.

On the other hand, the philidor is asking for trouble and I would be surprised to see a GM alive on earth that plays the philidor on serious games.

EDIT: OK, I made a quick database check and I really was very surprised . It seems eventhough it is still very rare and has a horrible score compared to other black responses, it's much more popular than I thought. Learning a different thing everyday, isn't that what the forums are for .

The philidor are played, but there are only some variations that are playable for it, ofcourse the 3... Bg4 that is so common in the lower levels is pure rubbish, and it isn't one of the variations that work.

I can name a few Grandmasters that have used the Philidor in atleast somewhat serious games.

Morozevich probably being the most famous of them.

That's true to some extent, but it's still inferior.

Philidor, the philidor (ha) is not THAT bad by any means, although it's kind of lets say unnecessarily defensive, as there is no real objective drawback to 2 ...Nc6, so I think 2...d6 is for people who want to play slowly and when played right, it's a very solid choice. In fact I have seen a video of a GM who played the philidor as black and he showed it because it was dynamic so you can't always control what kind of a position an opening will bring anyways.

I think white's position looks a lot better than it is (it IS good though). In fact after the further 3...Nd7 4 Bc4 white has to actually know some stuff, (like to play an early dxe5 at some point) or else black, after strengthening his position for several moves then plays ...exd4 in a position where the space brings white nothing and the pawn is under some pressure, meanwhile black frees the e5 and c5 squares for his knights, and I don't think white has much advantage at all. Should I post a diagram?

It's kind of ironic because this is actually a mistake, just simple development. I'll show why.

Ive seen that position in a Watson book, I agree black does great in that (h3) line. he had a4 always coming before h3, and he had 3 other ideas, one of which was to play Bg5 forcing h6, then losing time bringing the bishop back and finding a square on f5 for the knight

I'm just saying straightforward development doesn't always cut it against even an opening like the philidor. I still wouldn't touch this opening myself, because there are so many better options if you want to be solid.

Yep, I'm guilty of speaking too strongly without knowing enough about it. Kind of ironic, I know... Until recently I didn't even know there were 2 philidor positions, I thought there was only one (the one with the rook + pawn).

http://www.vanrekom.nl/thelion/indexgb.htm offers some lines of avariation of the philidor that seems okay for black.

I play the Philidor and it is a part of my main repertoire for black.

there are 2 ways to reach a Philidor position

and so on... they say that this line is very inferior for black.

Since I play only 1...d6 (on ALL White's first moves) I play

With this type of position, yes, its inferior but more comfortable as compared to the above position because the Knight is already posted on c3 square as compared to the earlier diagram with options of white moving the c-pawn (which will be very uncomfortable for Black).

Check out this game.

As I've said dxe5 is usually played early on, so most likely those two positions will transpose.

...f5 is pretty risky, and probably dubious. Supposedly it was Philidor's original idea when inventing this opening.

Yeah , Jim West beat me with the philidor counter gambit about a year ago, I can see playing an opening like that back the before computers. But I would think every player over 2000 in the Jersey area would just run some of the lines though Rybka and and be ready to crush his opening.