Improving on Owen's Defense?

Valuable contributions.

For a mediocre player like me, very educational.

no prob man. if there is any specific position you need advice on how to play, feel free to ask me, i know the Owen's like the palm of my hand.

if you are a class player, you will rarely face the real testing lines, instead you will get natural setup with 3.nc3 and 4.nf3 which equalize relatively quickly. even when you reach 1800 and 2000 level, you will meet someone with generic knowledge of the more testing tries (like bd3 qe2,or nc3 bd3 nge2) but i can guarantee you, they really dont know much beyond the general formation. Your prep can easily overtake theirs.

Great darkunorthodox88,
I have many questions but better step-by-step.
One is the question: d5 or c5 (see above)
1. With d5: black must be careful not to close the diagonal of its bishop at b7.
2. With d5: in case of exchange, black can easely take back with the queen as the queen has good squares at row 5.
3. With d5: black keeps pressure on white's centre.
Is this all true?

я человек

in the line shown above, nf6 is slightly premature. when black plays 3.e6 instead of 3.nf6, he will usually play 4.c5 first. One of the reasons why, is that black wants to tempt c3 so that if the f6 knight hops to d5, white has to waste an extra tempi  if he wants to play c4.

only in a few lines in the owen's does the f6 knight go to e4 instead of d5 or d7. usually only  when  the queen knight is on c3, and black can put extra pressure with bb4. In the line above, ne4 wastes too much time as white can just challenge the knight, and develop a piece without a pin via nbd2! black is now dangerously slow in development. 

yes, in a lot of lines with ne4, taking on the knight is poison because black will remove the d4 defender, and qxd4 follows.

in lines where you play d5, you WILL close the diagonal of your bishop but there is compensation for this. Black will go for either a big queenside cramp, via, c5-c4, b5, a5 going for b4, OR to play moves like c5 and a5, possibly with qc8, aiming for ba6 trading off the bad bishop. the positions are like the french defense, but their move order has some unique advantages and disadvantages (unlike the french defense with b6 thrown in, whites knight is in the inferior f3 square instead of e2, e2 is more dangerous, because white can begin with f4 and f5 after castling., also in a lot of these lines, white's queen is on e2, which means the ba6 trade off is more likely to work if you set it up, the downside is that you VERY rarely get to play f6 in this type of french as the e6 pawn becomes too weak, and black doesnt get to play qb6 early on)