The real moral of this is that you can't trust foreigners.
A Frenchman goes to Sicily
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Ok, so I’m playing chess in the correspondence style, trying with all my pitiful strength not to blindly follow the opening explorer. The temptation is nigh on irresistible, but not knowing adequate theory has lost me many a game. Even when I do a lot of research during a game, my tactical and strategic limitations let me down (I once extensively studied Fischer’s “A bust to the King’s Gambit” when facing it as black. Fischer famously states that “Of course, white can play differently, but then white loses differently”. White did indeed play differently, and I lost clumsily).
In my recent forays into the French Defence, a curious anomaly has presented itself. After playing 1…e6, I have often been faced with, rather than 2. d5, white has played 2. Nf3. Why is this an anomaly, you may ask. It is because the opening explorer is oblivious to move order. When you explore a game position, that is precisely what you are doing. You are not Finding the best move in a particular opening, you are searching for identical positions in the database, nothing more, nothing less. One consequence of this is unintended transposition. Note the following diagram:
According to the database, 2. Nf3 has been played in 1,510 master games. One may therefore drill down further, and expect to find the most popular response. What, I wonder, is the most played response to the 2. Nf3 variation of the French?
2…c5! And here was me thinking it was going to be 2…d5! But wait, there is more! 2. Nf3 has only been played in 1510 master games, but here we on black’s second response, and suddenly, 2…c5 has been played 56,656 times! How can there be more games of responses to moves than there are games of the initial move? The point, of course, is that there are not. The opening explorer cares not for previous move orders, it merely searches for that position. And with a Knight on f3, a white pawn on e4 and a black pawn on e6, the most number of positions with this arrangement have a pawn on c5 – The Sicilian Defence! (Apparently, the “French” Variation, rather unsurprisingly).
Having got myself in to all sorts of confusing positions this way, I post this thread as a gentle warning to players of comparable strength to I; beware the Opening Explorer, comrades, ‘tis a fickle oracle.
ED.