Pretty sure this is a gross oversimplification; black goes ...a6 in plenty of exchange slav lines anyways.

Hey moron, were you unable to hold off on your pithy one-liner until you read the next sentence? Or perhaps you were saying that you have been living your life wrong, as your only job here seems to be posting self-ownage?

Combined with your utterly irrelevant one-liner in the draws thread I think you don't add any value to this forum. I do think you are a good argument for having mods for this forum though.

I just switched from Thief to Babaschess and it's doing wonders for my blitz rating... WTF?

You're right. It doesn't really matter when you play a move. Heck, 1. .. a6 is probably one of the best possible moves since it's not committal, right? Hell, it worked for Miles. Thanks for your incredible insight!

Well, considering that 1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. cxd5 cxd5 4. Nf3 Nf6 5. Nc3 Nc6 6. Bf4 a6 is completely acceptable for black white should be hard pressed to transpose into an exchange slav line where a6 can be considered a simple waste of tempo. After all, most dangerous exchange lines involve Bb5 at some point.

And to avoid proving Dynasty right I'm not just trying to be a jerk here.

But this thought process has been followed by much much stronger players than myself. You just calling it a gross oversimplification is beyond arrogant. It's not an oversimplification at all. In fact I think most of any decent player would agree a6 certainly is losing some degree of tempo. But the simple fact is that given this exact position - it works and is quite difficult to exploit.

In fact the whole point is it's basically a slightly helpful waiting move as after e3 black can very happily develop his pieces. Which, in turn, was the idea behind my move of h3!?. If black's going to play a waiting move then so am I. Again before you go randomly bashing how moronic this idea is since I'm just some random internet player saying it - I'd like to take credit for it, but yet again - this is logic from players vastly stronger than myself.

it seems like every 5 years they start playing ...a6 1 move earlier in the Slav. So you're probably right, just 20 years ahead of your time.

Radjabov / Ubiyca just started playing on ICC right now. Crazy fun watching this guy play.

any suggestions beside MCO/NCO for a book that I can scour for new openings or are they the best sources by far? I'm not looking for only lines, but rather some kind of open-ended analysis as to where certain openings go, so i can see what kind of openings i would feel are most suited to the style i would want to play. gone are my days of playing 1-minute so I need to throw out the trash I've become way too accustomed to playing and actually learn some openings.

edit: some kind of a chess literature compendium or something for a sticky could be a good idea...

Why not just use something like chessbase+megabase and the game reference utility? You can instantly see how many people played each move and when it was latest played and the strongest player who played it. It's how I like to see in my games when/where we deviated from theory.

Did you not read noirdesire's reply?

what is this? looked up and down over chessbase's website.

John Watson has written several books "Mastering the Chess Openings". There are three volumes, one each about e4, d4 and c4. I believe a fourth volume (Nf3) is planned.
They are not "informator-style" like NCO nor do they present the latest theory. They present the most important variations of the openings and discuss the resulting middle-game positions.
In my opinion, they are excellent books (just like anything Watson writes).

Just meant using the chessbase database software. Then grab a suitably large, updated and high quality database like megabase. And then once you have those two you can go through the openings by opening a new board and click on the reference tab. It will show you every move that's been played in each position along with a variety of stats that you can customize. The default being: number of times it's been played, score %, last played, highest elo that's played this move, best players that have played this move, and players who frequently play this move.

You can then do a bunch of data manipulation at every move to get whatever information you could desire. I find it a whole lot easier than digging through tomes of information. But on the other hand, aside from annotated games you're left to understand the ideas behind the moves/etc by yourself.

So like for example at a glance I can tell you that the strongest player to play the from's gambit proper has been vasillias kotronias at about 2600 elo. Black scores quite well in the from's with a 50.2% score %, but the move 2. .. Nc6 instead of 2. .. d6 actually scores much better (40.6%) but over a much smaller sample (139 games instead of 1937) and the average white opponent was quite weak so the statistics themselves don't mean too much and it would need deeper investigation. The line in the From's where black scores best is 2. .. d6 3. Nf3 dxe 4. e4 Bc5.

That took about 40 seconds to figure out.

Yet again, it's not the same position. In that position after Bf4 a6 is a very important move since black would like to develop his bishop but after Bf5 Qb3! black is suddenly running into certain problems. Whereas after the sample variation 6. a6 e3 7. Qb3? Na5 white has simply wasted alot of time. In the chababananenrko a6 is far from necessary and again is just a somewhat helpful waiting move, but one that wastes time.

These are not particularly subtle aspects of the slav. I'd hope you were at least familiar with this much before deriding my comments as blatant oversimplification. The early a6 gives white alot more flexibility with his development and he can try for example ideas of Bg5!? which already poses black certain problems where he ends up practically forced to bring out his queen early in a position where he's already down a good amount of tempo. Other possibilities include Ne5!?

I really believe that any player of decent strength would immediately think something is just off about the chabaananernko and be looking for ways to do something about it. It's just a very awkward move. The fact that it seems to just work is a huge credit to that Moldovian coach, well or Shirov - depending on how you look at it.

Dire,

very cool stuff that I was not aware of. aside from ICC/FICS, I have zero other chess software so this is helpful. is megabase just a database that I can find on chessbase's website?

Modern chess is all about "do the variations work?". After all there is something strange about the najdorf (wtf is black doing there, playing a6 in a sharp position instead of developing, and later grabbing a pawn on b2 in an even sharper position) but it has stood the test of time.

While h3 is certainly an interesting idea, it doesn't really look more useful than a6 to me.

I can thank my opponent for making this possible, but still one of my better games.

I think in practice h3 is much more useful and it is even critical in some lines. One game went: 1. d4 d5 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. c4 c6 4. Nc3 a6 5. h3 dxc4 6. a4 e6 7. e3 c5 8. Bxc4 Nc6 9. O-O Be7 10. Qe2 cxd4 11. Rd1 e5 when the inability to play Bg4 already ensured white had a huge advantage thanks to h3 after exd exd Be3. It also becomes a very useful move allowing g4 in some variations. For example: 1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nf3 Nf6 4. Nc3 a6 5. h3 e6 6. e3 Nbd7 7. Qc2 Bd6 8. g4.

I don't know of any actual variations where a6 becomes particularly useful. In fact, white just scores incredibly well after h3: 66%! In the past 2 years white has scored a crazy 74% with white playing an average 100 points above his elo. In variations where black tries to make use of his a6 move for example with the immediate 5. .. b5 white is scoring just ridiculously well. After 5. .. b5 white scores 80% in fact! After 5. .. dxc4 white is also scoring 80%. Black's best, based on results, just seems to be 5. .. e6 admitting that a6 didn't really do much and get on with things as normal. But even then 6. c5 takes advantage of the weaknesses of a6 and black is left cramped and with tons of queenside dark square weaknesses with white yet again scoring rather well.

Thx, i have to analyse and maybe try that. In the only serious game i played against 4...a6 i played 5. c5 and got surprised by Bg4. I came out of the opening slightly worse and had to simplify into a rook ending i saw that was equal despite being a pawn down.

Your second sample variantion doesn't make much sense though, after all you don't need h3 to allow g4 since g4 is the "hot" move in the same position without h3 and a6 included. I can see that it's more useful there than a6 but black's moves don't make that much sense to me in that line. As I see it, a6 "threatens" to develop the Bc8 and h3 tries to avoid that.

How big are the sample sizes for your percentage scores and how good does 5.h3 score in games where both players are rated 2400+?

In games with both 2400+ white scores 60% after 5. h3, scoring about 50 points above his elo on average.

The sample sizes are not large. 5. h3 is still somewhat unexplored territory and 4. .. a6 isn't especially popular itself.

That said, I don't think that means too much. One frequent practitioner is GM Ivan Ivanisevic. He constantly plays 5. h3 and in a recent game against Morozevich who had to be prepared for it the best he also could come up with was 5. .. e6. Unfortunately Ivanisevic doesn't play 6. c5 but Morozevich still managed to get nothing that game besides a massive spatial disadvantage and eventual draw.

hey, stop discussing my secret 5.h3 :P (ok 1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 3.nf3 nf6 4.nc3 a6 5.h3 b5(?!) 6.c5 bf5 7.g4 is fun)

Yeah all the software is available there. You'll also have the pickup the normal version of chessbase as well. Unfortunately they're quite pricey, but in my case at least they ended up costing pennies per hour of use.

are there any (good) free databases that I can use with ChessBase Light?

edit: I guess this is a useless question since Light can only display 32000 games in a database and no more, which isn't that much in terms of analysis. Or is it?