CheerfulDazzle wrote:
Hello, fellow chess.com users. I want to share with you some experience of mine. I was playing pirc defense against e4 for some time, recently got bored and wanted to try something else (I guess it’s not the right thing to do if you wanna win games). So I stopped on the Sicilian, checked out some lines in opening explorer and got to work. I knew there was some amount of hate towards open Sicilian from e4 players, but couldn’t even imagine the scale. 90% of games my opponents didn’t play open Sicilian hoping to surprise me. Now, I’ haven’t played Sicilian for couple years, so they actually did (honestly I didn’t even know there are so many ways to avoid open Sicilian), but I guess it’s safe to assume that if somebody is playing 1...c5 for some time he will be more surprised to see you go for the open variation, while he/she now will have enough experience to play against 3.Bc5, 3.c3 and other lines...
Conclusion: idk who started the trend of avoiding open Sicilian to surprise your opponent, but he did a great job. However now surprise factor is no longer there and your opponent might actually know it even better (I assume initially it was done to avoid famous Sicilian theory). So next time your opponent plays 1...c5 consider playing open variation. Hope it brings you some success (also imo it’s more straightforward for white, just don’t hang your d4 knight)
P.S. I can only talk about opponents rated between 1100-1500, since I usually face those ranks during blitz arenas, so feel free to share your experience.
Conclusion: idk who started the trend of avoiding open Sicilian to surprise your opponent, but he did a great job. However now surprise factor is no longer there and your opponent might actually know it even better (I assume initially it was done to avoid famous Sicilian theory). So next time your opponent plays 1...c5 consider playing open variation. Hope it brings you some success (also imo it’s more straightforward for white, just don’t hang your d4 knight)
P.S. I can only talk about opponents rated between 1100-1500, since I usually face those ranks during blitz arenas, so feel free to share your experience.
The more your rating goes up, the less anti-Sicilians you see.
Conclusion: idk who started the trend of avoiding open Sicilian to surprise your opponent, but he did a great job. However now surprise factor is no longer there and your opponent might actually know it even better (I assume initially it was done to avoid famous Sicilian theory). So next time your opponent plays 1...c5 consider playing open variation. Hope it brings you some success (also imo it’s more straightforward for white, just don’t hang your d4 knight)
P.S. I can only talk about opponents rated between 1100-1500, since I usually face those ranks during blitz arenas, so feel free to share your experience.