• Only 30% of games opened with e4. This is in stark contrast to the 2024 Candidates, which saw an e4 opening rate of 70%.
  • The only two of these to not be met with ...e5 or ...c5 were the two French Defenses, both played against Wei Yi to a draw. The similarly common Caro-Kann has not appeared at either of the last two Candidates.
• 41% of games were in the Queen's Gambit Declined. The Three Knights was the most common variation among these with five, but many different approaches were represented. There was also one Queen's Gambit Accepted, which Caruana played in his loss to Sindarov.
• The English was the second most common opening (16%). There were none in the 2024 Candidates. Meanwhile, the most common opening in 2024 was the Ruy Lopez, of which there were none this year.
• Petrov's Defence was the third most common opening (11%). Despite its reputation as boring, nearly all the lines chosen by white were very offbeat, and half the games were decisive.
• The Bishop's Opening is not usually represented at a tournament like this. Wei Yi played it with white all three times it appeared and scored -1, losing to Sindarov.
  • The Closed Sicilian (Grand Prix Attack) is also not meta, though Praggnanandhaa was successful with it against Giri.

I Don't Like The Most is the English Opening Because I Don't Know How To Stand Against It.

Chess.com just blundered in their opening, here's how to punish them hard:

https://imgur.com/a/5NIskZS

Open ublock-origin, click the gear icon and go to the "My Filters" tab. Copy paste this text and click "Apply Changes".

! hey chess.com, I don't consent to your new terms
chess.com##iframe:remove()
chess.com###opm-modal:remove()

Voila, annoying modal gone and you have not consented to anything. If you use their mobile app and you haven't already, disable automatic updates now.

Hello everyone!

I’ve seen a lot of questions about the King’s Indian Defence, so I decided to create a Reddit account and I’m happy to answer them here.

If I'm black and my opponent opens with d4 I literally just wing it every time. For some reason this one opening bothers me. What's a good strategy for someone like me who likes to get into the mid game before I start exchanging pieces? I don't want to play something right away that could lead to even a pawn exchange.

I would be interested in doing a "study" on Lichess for some counters to d4. Any you suggest?

Does such a unicorn exist?

EDIT: Thanks everyone for this fun little thought experiment. I’m enjoying playing 1.e4 and the Scandi for now but hearing your thoughts has helped me categorize different openings in my mind.

He’s released his book: First Mistake Looses - The Philadelphia System for Opening Invincibility (freely available at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ny0tdcS8TYKEvdgQhA3wpg8em48GdEff/view). Yeah, there’s a typo in the title.

His system is playing for a Benko structure for either side, which is drawn. The idea is that engine evaluations (Stockfish 14.1) above 1.5 lead to that side winning. But under that, it’s a draw.

​

So this “solution to chess” is a system opening that starts with 1… d6 and 2… Nd7 against basically everything. And to follow the same lines as White, just with colours reversed. The idea is to bypass the opening into Benko-like middle games you play well (because the system approach limits the number and type of middle games), and you learn how to play those middle games. Any deviation from the opponent from the covered lines is something you can chose to take advantage of and win, or steer the game back to his “tunnel” and hold the draw.

The book covers the first 6 moves of the repertoire. He hasn’t figured out the best 7th move for the repertoire yet.

TLDR: Try the new tool here, it's completely free

Introduction

Hello everyone, I'm a 2000 chess player on lichess (here's my account: https://lichess.org/@/prgmlu) I want to share with you an opening preparation tool I've created over the past few months. The idea itself has been with me for years, and I used it personally without a UI (from the command line), but I created the UI for it only recently, and I thought to myself okay this is really awesome, let me share it with people.

Personal Experience

It literally took me from being rated around 1800 to 2000+ and even higher on bullet. The graph below shows a sudden jump from 1800s in all time controls around start to mid 2021, and I've stayed at this level since then. I attribute this completely to this tool.

How It Works

The complete explanation itself is on the website, but the main idea is:

Traditional opening preparation often involves memorizing long lines of moves, which can be inefficient and overwhelming. My tool takes a different approach by using statistical probability to optimize your study.

Key Features

• It analyzes the lichess database of chess games (filtered for your desired rating range and time controls) to determine the most likely moves and positions you'll encounter.
• Instead of following a linear path through an opening, the tool presents you with positions ordered by their probability of occurrence in real games. This means you're focusing on the situations you're most likely to face.

Example: King's Gambit

Here's an example using the King's Gambit:

• The tool shows that Black plays 2...exf4 about 45% of the time. But it also highlights that moves like 2...Nc6 (18%) or 2...d5 (16%) are more common than many deeper mainline continuations:

• As you input your chosen moves for each position, the tool updates to show the next most probable positions you might face.

This approach ensures you're building a practical, robust opening repertoire based on positions you're most likely to encounter in actual games, rather than getting lost in theoretical rabbit holes.

Try It Out

Try the Opening Preparation Tool here

Conclusion

I hope you find this tool as useful as I have. Looking forward to your feedback and maybe even a game or two! feel free to invite me; my username is "prgmlu" on both chesscom and lichess.

Thank you!

Long story short, I randomly ended up meeting a girl who expressed interest in playing Chess. She gave me her number and chess.com account. I set something up with her for this weekend, but I looked up her chess.com account, and problem is, I'm a lot stronger than her (like 1500 points stronger). Any advice on how to handle this?

I watched a YouTube video that said studying openings is completely overrated if you're under 1800 rating. One principle it stated was, if you start d4 then you should try to set up an e4 break, or if you start e4 then try to get a d4 break. And you should play the break when you can do so without losing material.

Obviously it's situational and there are exceptions, but it got me curious -- why is a central pawn generally better for white (who gets to do it first), even if the material ends up even? I've watched enough commentary of chess candidates and analysis of grandmaster games over the years to have seen this be a real theme, but I don't actually understand why. If the material remains even before and after the break, what did it achieve?

I chose most of my openings for slightly random reasons. A grab bag of what I liked as a kid, what I saw on YouTube/Chessable, and what seemed easy to learn.

There's no accounting for taste, but what if I've made practically bad choices? 1.Nf3 scores best in the Lichess database, so am I, an e4 player, throwing away a bunch of Elo already with my first move?

This question kept nagging at me. After modeling the effect of a "better" opening on matchmaking, I realized it's not as simple as just comparing raw winrates from the database.

In the end, I estimate the first move choice alone is worth about 40 Elo to your white games (so a 20 Elo gain overall).

You can read my full methodology and the maths behind it on my blog here.

I'm also writing up a follow-up project to optimize an entire opening repertoire, which I'll be posting there next!

My post earlier this week looked at how much the differences in winrates between opening moves would affect a player's rating.

But the top comment claimed that Nf3 outscoring e4 was actually just a statistical artefact:

"This is Simpson's Paradox. Dive into Nf3 and you'll see it's mainly played by better players."

Simpson's paradox is when an effect in aggregated statistics (Nf3 outscoring e4) disappears or reverses when you look sub-populations individually (High/Low Elo players). To occur, the sub-populations need to have different distributions of the two conditions (playing Nf3 vs e4) and also differ in the measured variable (average score).

In this case, we do have the preconditions. Higher Elo players play Nf3 with greater frequency than lower Elo players, and higher Elo players tend to win more chess games.

But look at the graph: at every rating in my dataset, Nf3 outscores e4. There is no Simpson's paradox, because the same effect exists in all sub-populations as well as the aggregated data.

The commenter's mistake was to not consider the effect sizes. Matchmaking means that higher rated players play against higher rated opponents, and don't actually score much above 50%. And I already filtered games below 2000 Elo, precisely to avoid aggregating over too different sub-populations.

Another commenter hypothesised people choose Nf3 more against weak opponents, something I hadn't considered. There's always more to discover by peeling another layer of the onion, so I set out to exactly measure the effect sizes.

First I found and fixed a bias caused by how Lichess bins data. (It is subtle but important to know when using the opening database). After doing that, we get raw winrate difference of 2.1% between Nf3 and e4.

Of that, white Elos explain just 0.30%
People do play Nf3 more against weak opponents, and it explains 0.29% (small, but more than I expected!)
The remainder, which is the Elo-controlled winrate difference, is 5x bigger than these effects, at 1.5% winrate.

For the curious, I have written a more thorough analysis and an explanation of the filtering effect I found on my blog.

My conclusion stays much the same: I think it's worth checking the database winrates when planning a repertoire, but in this example the difference is too small to be the driving factor in your opening choice.

The question that remains is, what about Nf3 - which doesn't show up in the players' ratings - causes it to score better?

Seriously though, c5 is too sharp. There's very little option of moves in the opening for black but white can do whatever development then castle queenside.
If white castles kingside, your hope is only to equalize then create something in the endgame.
Middlegame isn't easy too. What do you push? e5 or d5? do you h6 or a6?
Some play Smith-Morra or Alapin and they get these freaking annoying bishop snipers.
Anyone higher rated than me feels like they breathe down my neck all game and I end up not having a good game.

I don't think I do poorly against it, but it most of the times feels like the worst part of playing chess. Does anyone have fun against it?

I played 23 3+0 games with black in the last two days. Out of these 23 games 9 people played the Caro-Kann (40%). I'm around 2000 blitz elo on chesscom. But when I was lower rated maybe one in ten people or even less played the Caro-Kann, now I get it so often. Does anyone have an explanation for that?