Secrets of the Sicilian - GM Ben Finegold [04-07-2021]

[Music] hey everybody it's grand master ben feingold here we have some technical issues hopefully this video will make it to the internets um it'll be a miracle so it could be that we're the only people who will ever see this video we want to thank our sponsor robert because that's our sponsor and his his last name is anonymous which is a lot of people have that last name um today's lecture is called secrets of the sicilian unlike previous lectures where i have pictures and information and games i got nothing it's all in here okay it's sort of like kramer except you know maybe i'll remember some stuff um and so forth so we're going to talk about not from anybody's point of view we're going to talk about um uh from everybody's point of view okay so uh the sicilian uh starts with e4 c5 and it doesn't have to start with e4 c5 um because any opening you can have transpositions so if a game is a sicilian it's probably at least 95 that this was the first move for each side but it's not a hundred percent um because these moves could be played later and it transposes to a sicilian but that's neither here nor there now this this is an issue that i've talked about quite a bit with my students but it seems to go above their head for the most part and i decided to make this lecture very simple this will be my simplest lecture ever so if you don't know the rules of chess you should still be okay okay which is probably about half of you all right so in the sicilian you have to understand why you're playing certain moves and what a lot of people do when they learn an opening they close their eyes and they make the same 5 10 moves they make every game but they don't know why they're doing it that's just what they always do so this lecture is going to explain why you're making the moves so that when you have a similar position or even the same in your own game you'll actually know why you're making the move instead of i always make this move i don't know now the purpose of the sicilian defense from the black side um well i should say is to confuse itself with the queen's gambit for the for the mini series but i won't talk about that is to stop white from playing d4 on move two and if we go back a move if white could move again and super grand masters were white they would play d4 here and the two most common openings the idea is to prevent d4 that would be c5 the sicilian and e5 and if black plays any other move on move one such as e6 d6 c6 then 95 of the time grand masters play d4 so c5 says if you play d4 i'm gonna take it now this is a very this is the most important thing in the sicilian is you understand why you're playing the sicilian you're playing the sicilian with black because you're trying to prevent white from playing d4 and if white does play d4 then you take the d4 pawn if you don't take the d4 pawn then why why did you play the sicilian he plays d4 and you're ignoring it so in this position for example if white played if white played d4 then you would take it if you don't take it that doesn't make any sense okay so at the grand master level i have to make up some percentage eighty-five percent or more play than move knight f3 and the reason is you're developing your knight and if you are gonna play d4 which is called the open sicilian you're gonna capture with the knight instead of moving your queen because you don't want to move your queen in the opening you can move your queen but i'm telling you the reason why they play knight f3 now everybody's favorite grand master bent larson who was very active in the 60s and 70s and he died several years ago um he said it's a crime for white to play the open sicilian because you shouldn't give up a center pawn for a side pawn okay very very suspicious understanding of chess but that's what almost every grand master does because that gives white the best chance of getting an advantage is to play d4 and both of the bishops and both of the knights can get out for white and black has a lot of trouble developing his pieces and black usually gets a solid passive position and white plays very aggressively unfortunately for white he has to give up a center pawn for the sicilian c pawn to do it now you don't have to play the open sicilian with white but most people do and if you have the black pieces and you play the sicilian a lot most people play one of three moves here knight c6 d6 or e6 and occasionally you'll see g6 or a6 occasionally and i mean basically everybody was playing the open sicilian and then people started to play what are called anti-sicilians so a lot of people were playing bishop b5 on move three instead of playing d4 and against e6 fisher for example liked to play the king's indian attack because he thought this was a poor move against the king's indian attack which is d3 knight bd2 g3 bishop g2 castles so you don't have to play the open sicilian and fisher when he faced knight c6 and d6 would play the open sicilian but against e6 half the time he'd played up half the time he would play d3 and play the king's indian attack and fischer has a lot of famous games against that and to be perfectly honest i'm not a hundred percent sure why fisher thinks the king's indian attack is really good against e6 but not as good against d6 or knight c6 um i mean obviously black can't play e5 without losing a tempo and you know white's ready to play e5 if black plays d5 so that's one thing going for it okay now uh the open sicilian which is the most common and i'll play a random move for black that's the most common is d4 takes knight takes and in any sicilian that's the open sicilian the most important thing that can happen in the opening is asking yourself can i play knight f6 and i've prevented e5 if you play knight f6 and they play e5 and you move your knight away that's bad but if e5 is a bad move then you could play knight f6 so you're worried about e5 when you're black and if they can't play e5 then you're good and you want to play knight f6 here because if you don't white has the chance to play c4 and then knight c3 the so-called barazi bind and gets a space advantage and it's hard for black to break out however if black plays the common knight f6 um 97 of grand master games white plays knight c3 and you can't move the c pawn now it's blocked and in this position the two most common moves are the knight orf a6 and the dragon with g6 and another popular move is knight c6 and in fact this is a position i have a lot with black but i play a different move order and we're actually going to talk about move orders and why certain grand masters play certain move orders okay and after the move d6 white can also play bishop b5 check and after the move knight c6 white could also play bishop b5 instead of the open sicilian and so if you have the black pieces you have to ask yourself do i prefer this position with black or do i prefer this position with black if your intention is to put both knights out anyway because that's the main way that white would not do that if white plays the open sicilian anyway which is this you could get this position by playing d6 first or you could play knight c6 first to get this position the only thing you're worried about is white playing bishop b5 i am in the minority of grand masters not a huge minority but an obvious minority that doesn't mind bishop b5 here i actually like having black here and i don't know anything about bishop b5 here most grand masters are the other way around they like to have black here but against knight c6 they're more uncomfortable now there's a grand master some of you have heard of i hope named eugene perelstein and he's an american grandmaster and he's one of the world's leading authorities on the accelerated dragon where the move order that that i play is knight c6 d4 takes takes g6 this is the normal main way you played accelerated dragon with black and i don't play the accelerated dragon every time i play the sicilian i used to now i probably play it like a third of the time and the other two thirds i play some other variation now some grand masters don't like to face bishop b5 here so eugene perlstein recommends if you want to play the accelerated dragon but don't want to face bishop e5 he plays g6 on move two and now if it goes the same way we can get the accelerated dragon position but there was no bishop b5 okay and so if you play g6 here you have to learn other things that white can do that he can't do against knight c6 the main one is queen takes d4 which obviously you can't play when there's a knight on c6 and uh eugene thinks this is fine for black but you need to know the theory you can't just be like okay now what do i do now the biggest problem with a lot of class players and even some masters is they play an opening but there's a sideline or there's a variation they don't know that variation happens their opponent knows all kinds of theory and they're like uh oh i know 20 variations but this is one i don't know and then they sit there confused and they play badly and if that happens to you that's actually okay i actually don't mind when that happens when my opponent plays something i don't know which is my fault okay then we play the game maybe i lose maybe i don't then when the game is over i can analyze that variation to the teeth i have a game i can analyze it with an engine or with chest space or whatever i use and then the next time i'll know it and sometimes you have to learn just by trial and error you can't memorize every single variation get to it so if you've played the sicilian for 10 years you've seen a lot of different stuff if you've played the sicilian for 10 days there's just a lot of things you don't know because you don't have the experience so obviously it's unfortunate that you have to get some of that experience without learning it first but that's actually what you should do it's very difficult to memorize everything and it never happened to you it's much easier when it's happened to you right you're like oh i lost to this guy and i beat this guy and even if you lost um it doesn't necessarily mean it was the result of the opening and just to tell you what the main line is it's knight f6 e5 knight here the queen goes to either this square or this square i'm not super familiar and then i think they play queen e4 and then i don't you know i'm not the knight goes here or here i don't know okay and then um [Music] perilstrine told me he thinks this is fine for black and so if this is fine for black and he doesn't like bishop e5 on move three then he's gonna play g6 on move two and so that's that's what perl stein does and that's a move order in the accelerated dragon which avoids bishop b5 okay and if you want to play knight c6 because you're playing you know some some variation of the sicilian you have to know bishop b5 a lot more now than you did 30 40 50 years ago um i almost want to say i don't want to say it i almost want to say bishop b5 might be more popular than d4 yeah if i said that 30 years ago they would have taken my titles away now it might be true and so if you have black and a sicilian and you decide to play some variation you know the dragon the night or whatever and you have to know what the sidelines are with the move order that you play and i'll give you a really interesting example the the the cheveningen as us americans say was very popular okay this was super popular in the 50s 60s 70s and 80s okay this this position and for about 15 20 years people played the keras attack named after the estonian grandmaster and white had really good results i'm not saying it's good for white i'm saying white did really well probably it's good for white and white's going to play g5 and so forth and some boring players they didn't want to play g4 so they played bishop e2 and or they played h3 or they played a4 that you know they played something that was innocuous and a lot of people wanted to play this shivan again but they didn't want to face the kara's attack so in the 80s it became very popular to pretend to play the night or a6 now night or was named after your favorite grandmaster miguel nightorf and knightorf played the nightdorf because he wanted to play the move e5 and the problem with e5 right now is i have bishop b5 check and again if you're rated a thousand 1200 1400 1600 1800 these are the kind of things you don't know you just like you opened a book on the night off and said okay i'll play that that's sort of the purpose of this lecture is to tell you why you're playing these moves the problem with e5 is after bishop b5 check white has easy access to these squares for his knights and white doesn't black doesn't want to trade the white squared bishops but even if he blocks with the knight here this knight can go to f5 so e5 is considered somewhat suspicious but some gm still play like as a surprise surprise but that's i don't think it's a good surprise all right so after a6 um no matter what move white plays bishop e2 bishop e3 we can play the knight orf with e5 um or f4 or f3 but people who want to play the chevin again but wanted to avoid the charis attack they're just pretending to play the night or you can't play g4 now because it's hanging there's there's no pawn on e6 blocking the bishop so if white thinks oh it's a night orf in the night orf i play bishop e2 they play e5 i go here and i know 700 moves a theory okay well it's a lot of people in the 80s and 90s they started playing a6 so they could play this chaven again and white's already played bishop e2 now g4 is not as scary because in allah cara's attacks the bishop comes out to here or here bishop eats who's sort of meek it's just a castle it's not a super aggressive move and so this became quite common to play the shivanigan but avoid the keras attack so you play a6 first then you play e6 when you know if they make a move that you know makes g4 less less strong for white and that's very common nowadays and a lot of people are still playing the night or way the way that night orphan tended but some of them aren't and obviously you can also play the dragon which is also very common and these openings have been played by all kinds of masters grand masters all the time play this and this is this is a discussion that doesn't really have an answer i'll give you my opinion your opinion could be different doesn't mean that you're right or i'm right we're probably both wrong if you play the most common openings that have the stamp of approval from all the top players you run the risk of your opponent knowing it better than you if you play your own stuff stuff that's not very common but you play it a lot then you're gonna know it better than your opponent if you play the most common moves that have been played in thousands of grand master games you're going to have a memory contest with your opponent so if you're like a lazy not studying too much chess kind of person because you have a family and a job ridiculous or you know something else and you don't have time to study openings as much as certain other people do you might not want to play openings that are known for having 20 moves of theory because you don't have the time to look at it but if you're the kind of guy who says i'm going to learn this opening that all the grand masters play and i'm going to know it just like they do if anish giri and magnus carlson come up to me i can have an interesting discussion about the dragon because i know it as well as they do i studied this game i studied that game i studied this game or you can be like this is the dragon that's all i know now i don't recommend playing really sharp complicated sicilians when your theoretical knowledge ends on move four i don't recommend that so if you play the dragon or the night or and then your opponent makes a move on move five or six and you're like okay i'm on my own that's that's a very risky you know venture so if you're going to do a lot of serious study then you should play the openings that grand masters all like if you know it as well as they do you play the first 10 15 moves like a grand master now in the dragon not only can white play the yugoslav attack which is bishop e3 and f3 and white plays queen d2 and castle's queen side sometimes white plays bishop c4 first sometimes white plays g4 sometimes white plays h4 sometimes white plays both and a lot of people that have black and a dragon they try to make up their own way of playing that isn't the most common so their opponent doesn't have 25 moves prepared and some people with white do that too and another way to play for white is to not castle a queen side and play for mate but just you know castle king's side and just play a positional way where nobody's getting checkmated and you know you're white's trying to prove he has a better position because he has more space it's not easy to put this bishop anywhere the knight's good in the center and what a lot of people do is they take shortcuts is they study an opening they get to move five six or seven their engine says it's equal or somebody's slightly better and they're like all right that's enough i'm done and if you do that and the opening is very unusual i think that's fine because your opponents think they're confused like you but if you're if you're gonna play open sicilians and play night orbs and dragons and you're like yeah i don't i don't know anything past move five i that's a recipe for disaster okay and i'll give you an example from my own games um i play knight c6 when i'm black okay and i usually face the open sicilian in this position uh all the super grand masters are playing this fashion cover now with e5 which i've never played i play d6 now when i'm playing on my stream and if you watch my stream or you've seen my games i have black in this position all the time i had it 20 years ago 15 years ago 10 years ago i probably had it 20 times last week and blitz stress and when my opponents are very low rated they're rated you know 500 800 1100 1400 they're they're out of their prep that's this is it that's all they know that's it and you know if i'm playing a grand master and i am you know we go to move 12 or 13 before one of us starts saying okay now what and a common move that's played by low-rated players is this move which is just a generic move like move my bishop out and the first like secret in the secrets of the sicilian lecture that i'm giving like an important secret is when you have the white pieces don't let your opponent play knight g4 and it's good and it's sort of like when you have the black pieces and you play knight f6 if e5 is good then don't play knight f6 and i want to go back as i forgot to tell you in this position where i play knight f6 you can't play e5 because you know guy takes it and if you want to play knight takes and e5 black has a trick here if black didn't have this trick then grandmasters would play knight takes at e5 and you know if you're a low-rated player even if you've memorized an opening book better than i could ever do well this isn't given in the opening book because it's bad nobody plays this with white so if some low-rated player played this against you and you had the black pieces you would say well this isn't theory what's this all about and you might play knight d5 after which i would take the white pieces okay and obviously what you should do which some of you have already seen is queen a5 check and that wins the pawn on e5 that's why grandmasters don't do this now after knight c3 if it was white's turn to move here and it's not what and if any grand minister would play knight takes and then e5 and black has to go back to g8 terrible and so the book moves here are d6 e6 and e5 and by the way after e6 one of the main main main lines is take take e5 knight d5 this is a and this is considered better for white but this is a this is what white would do if black did that okay and i play d6 so i put the kibosh on e5 now if i'm playing somebody very strong it's 90 percent they'll play bishop c4 or bishop g5 those are the most common moves if i play a very low rated player and they're they're like okay that's all i know i'm out they'll play like random legal move maybe here and that allows the a4 mentioned knight g4 and occasionally even against higher rated players 1900 2100 in a blitz game they they fail here and they get a losing position immediately and many times in my life in blitz chess and bullet chess i've done this with black and they either play knight b3 or knight takes knight and then i checkmate them and then usually i win because checkmate obviously movie knight is ridiculous and after knight g4 theory says black is fine grandmasters don't play bishop e3 now i don't want to confuse you too much in the night or sicilian which is different okay so the positions exactly the same except it's not the difference is a6 was played instead of knight c6 that's the difference in this position tons of grand masters play bishop e3 a move that i said no grand masters play if the black knight is on c6 and the reason is there's no pressure on this knight after knight g4 bishop g5 this position has been seen in thousands of grand master games but this knight's defended and it's not attacked if there was a black knight on c6 then queen b6 is very strong attacking two things now queen b6 isn't strong at all and there's a lot of grand master games in this position but bishop e3 in one position is reasonable but it's not reasonable in another position because of knight g4 if knight g4 is strong and it puts you in a lot of trouble then now you know why in the dragon sicilian for example after bishop e3 black cannot play knight g4 that move actually loses immediately can somebody unmute themselves and tell me the winning move for white white supply and win if anybody's talking i can't hear them nothing some somebody give the wrong answer i don't care is anybody saying anything anyone someone said bishop e5 a b5 check i said that doesn't seem right that's correct i'm not sure where that sound came from all right um right bishop b5 check is winning for white because the knight knight here is not protected sufficiently if you put something on d7 the knight is hanging for example bishop d7 chop chop chum chum if it's free it's for me okay so uh nobody plays knight g4 because it loses they play bishop g7 now if it was black's turn to move knight g4 is possible because after bishop e5 check we could play king f8 it's possible so if you play like queen d2 which is a bad move now knight g4 is really good bishop b5 does nothing because the queen's not on the knight so i can put anything i want on d7 and in any sicilian on the internet when i'm playing blitz chess and my opponents are lower rated than i am and they let me play knight g4 when it's when it's good it's very common they give me their bishop on e3 if black plays knight here knight takes bishop that's very bad for white it's two bishops all the dark squares there's no attack for white and so every grand master plays f3 that's why i don't have white in the sicilian never play f3 then they can play queen d2 they're in a leisure but the point isn't that you should know exact move orders the the point is i mean you should but that's not the point point is you should know what moves are dangerous and in a sicilian when you have black e5 is dangerous if your opponent plays e5 and you go oh i didn't see that you can't not see that that's that's the move you have to see and if you have the white pieces and your opponent plays knight g4 and you're like oh i didn't see that you got to see that that's that's what you got to see that's the moves you're worried about and sometimes your opponent can make those moves but you're not so worried you're like ah it's okay okay i saw knight g4 wasn't worried about it i saw e5 no problem and you know sometimes you're wrong but usually you're right you figure out what what's going on and at the grand master level at currently the night or is very common for black and also common um i guess more recently is this fashionakov which is and they usually play this move order you could play more than one move order so magnus for example likes to have black in this position he has many times many other grand masters have as well and it's very complicated and i could have said this like the first thing in the lecture the reason people well i'm not saying it's their reason but it should be their reason the reason you should play this sicilian is that you want an interesting game you don't want a boring game where you're fighting for equality that's not what you want you want an interesting game that has very few draws and is very combative and usually when white plays e4 and black plays c5 as we see here they both want a combative game they don't want to draw they want to win they want a game that's very interesting and sometimes sometimes at the top level when it's e4 e5 sometimes it's not very interesting sometimes they trade everything off and agree to a draw pretty quickly and the sicilian that's a much more rare event and when you're playing in a match and you're in a must-win situation with black it's very common to play the sicilian and world champions who were considered very combative and didn't draw very much like fisher and kasparov they played the sicilian some world champions are considered less interesting and they maybe they played the caro con or e4 e5 with black maybe now in every opening where white plays e4 if he wants to play d4 but doesn't want to take with a piece he wants to take with the pawn keep that pawn on d4 he plays c3 okay and if you have the black pieces many people could play c3 against you and there's several different ways to play for black and you have to decide which one you like do you like playing e6 and d5 possibly transposing to an advanced french do you like playing d5 and taking with the queen do you like playing knight f6 and then playing knight d5 here and you have to decide what fits your you know like what you what you happen to like there's a very funny quote from uh sveshnikov who was the world's leading authority and the most likely player to play c3 on move two sveshnikov said it's very unfortunate that as a child when you're learning chess if you learn chess as a child and then you later became a grandmaster a lot of times the openings you learned as a child that's that's what you've played your whole life so you played as a grand master and he said it's just total luck that some people learn d5 here and some people learn knight f6 and then he said obviously knight f6 is better that was his opinion and so he felt bad for grand masters who learned this early on in their chess career because they had to play that inferior move okay which is the move that i play so and he was very adamant that this is the way for black to get a good position and he thought white had an advantage after d5 takes queen takes i mean that's it's a little silly but okay and you can also of course play e6 and d5 um now here's what i do when i have white and a sicilian which is rare i try to confuse my opponent and if i play knight f3 they think it's going to be an open sicilian so they play their open sicilian move which is usually one of these three moves and let's say for example i'll give you an example so you see where i'm coming from let's say you always play knight f6 and you always get this position with black that's your bread and butter that's what you learned and you're very happy with it okay and then after knight f3 you play the svashnikov now you play you play the dragon so you play here you're gonna play a dragon sicilian and now your opponent plays here and you're like wait what that's not the dragon sicilian that's the c3 sicilian with these two moves thrown in and this is devastating if you don't know it especially if you play d5 on move two so which by the way i do so so in this position if you always play d5 which i do and then you always play the dragon and the guy goes here you've been tricked unless you already know about this and you have to have something ready you have to be ready for the c3 sicilian move two and on move three and i talked to a couple of grandmaster friends of mine before you guys were born and i tried to ask them i said is there a negative for white playing the c3 sicilian but playing here first and they were like a negative knight knight on f3 what's wrong with that i'm not playing f4 later i don't do that so knight f3 c3 often tricks my opponents to play a move order they don't understand and so for example boris gelfand who's one of the best prepared players ever he was tricked because against the closed sicilian which goes like this okay this is this is what this is this is what gel fan does with black and this is what most grandmasters do with black against the closed sicilian and when he was when he was black in an open sicilian he played the night orth that's that's that's gelfand go gelfand the only chess player on earth you've heard of that's older than me okay and many years ago somebody played this against gelfand and he played here waiting for the sicilian and his opponent played here and he made some move i don't know and then here and then and then he's like wait i don't play this this isn't my opening or maybe he played even g6 you know waiting for this kind of close sicilian and then after g6 the guy played here and this is an accelerated dragon gel fan doesn't play the accelerated dragon so sometimes if white plays a flexible move order black has to be flexible too and black has to realize you can't always play the opening you want if the guy plays a move order you don't understand i mean that's you know that's that's not going to happen and i'll show you something really funny actually um one of my former students talia cervantes we worked together for like two years and she's like 2300 something and she lives in st louis and after e4 she started playing e5 and she wasn't playing that normally that was like a new thing for her and i played her in foxwoods um two years ago and i was like oh yeah she plays e5 now i don't really play e4 very much but i was going to play something weird against her sicilian then it occurred to me i could play here and this is what how our game went and the reason i did this is this is a line in the english opening that i knew when i was a kid that she's never seen before so i tricked her into playing black in an english opening where i knew lots of theory and she didn't although i was worse after the opening and then i won anyway but yeah that has to do with getting positions you're familiar with that your opponent is not by having your pet variations you can often get an opening advantage and one move that was the favorite of the estonian grandmaster paul cares again him again is 92. and now is white going to play knight here g3 bishop g2 or is white going to play d4 well you don't know so you have to be ready for these moves otherwise if you play the night or sicilian you might play here thinking okay now we're gonna now we're gonna play a night of sicilian okay we're a dragon and then your opponent plays this and you're like well if i play the knight or if i can't go here so i hope he goes d4 and then he plays here and you're like i don't play this with black what is this it's just a closed sicilian where you've been tricked into playing stuff you don't play and if you have the white pieces and you play a flexible move like knight e2 where the guy doesn't know if you're gonna play d4 or g3 sometimes you can get people where they're totally confused and a lot of people who want to play f4 in the sicilian they preface it with knight c3 because most people most grandmasters think d5 is a good response and if you take you know white centers basically collapsed so they play knight c3 first and then then they play f4 for people who play that way and there was there's something called the grand prix attack which starts this way so named because on the british grand prix tour this was a very common opening in the 80s and 90s at the top level not so common it doesn't matter much for the typical player what the super grand masters do i try to avoid what they do because i think that's the most likely thing my opponent will know i think if carlson plays kramnik and the game is analyzed by every grand master in the world if i play one side of that it's likely no matter who i'm playing they've seen that but if i play something nobody knows that i've played a lot which i do then you know my opponents are more confused and you know every everything theoretically should lead to a draw so nothing that doesn't lose material for any should should be bad you might not be you know fighting for the advantage you're fighting for a position that you like that your opponent doesn't and so if you're black and a sicilian and you're like i play the night or or i play the dragon or whatever that's like 20 of being ready for the sicilian because your opponent doesn't have to let you play the dragon or let you play the knight or for whatever variation you play they can play c3 early they can play f4 early they can play queen takes d4 instead of knight takes which i've also done bishop b5 is a very common move and so you have to know anti-sicilians when you play the sicilian as black and when you have white obviously if you play e4 you got to know everything the french the carol everything so the sicilian normally people don't have the luxury of studying chess 12 hours a day so they don't have like three or four different variations they play they have like one or two they're like okay sicilian this is what i do cairo khan this is what i do french this is what i do you can't just you know be like yvonne chuck and just play everything and know everything because that's that's hard to do and what do i recommend i recommend doing something you like where you don't have to learn 20 different things and the riskiest thing you can do for to make it likely you'll get confused is to just play any open sicilian then you're going to have to do a lot of work because your opponent could play basically seven or eight different variations typically if you're white in an open sicilian your opponents playing what they play if they play the night or that means they play the night or if they play the dragon that means they play the dragon so if you have to learn all these different lines with white and your opponent's only learning one that makes it tougher for you it's not impossible but that's why a lot of people are playing bishop b5 after either d6 or knight c6 because now their opponent can't play any open sicilians and they just learn bishop b5 or like me they play c3 and occasionally i'll even play queen takes d4 and i have some tricky lines that i've memorized in this line i don't play e4 that often but if i do play e4 i don't want to run into 25 moves of theory and my opponent's moving instantly that's not that's not for me and the thing to learn about the sicilian it's such a common opening that it's very likely your opponent has a lot of knowledge so if you go into a very well-known line but you don't know it very well that's that's very risky you gotta you gotta know what you're doing and the more common lines if you play sidelines that you like you know like the wing attack or b3 or even knight a3 was played for a while get that knight to c4 later you can play what you want and if you study it you'll know it better than your opponent and when you have the black pieces you have to be ready for everything uh you you can't you can't be shocked yet to be like okay the guy played the wing gambit that's what a lot of class players do sometimes they play the delayed wing gambit which is even stranger and the ideas if you take with the knight you can build a big center bam for that for the b-pawn which doesn't matter very much that's a pawn so when you think you know everything about the sicilian the variations you play it's almost impossible to stop your opponent from playing a sideline that they know so obviously at the top level of chess these guys all know each other and they study each other's games so if carlson starts playing knight a3 on move two you can't just not know that you gotta be like oh yeah two months ago carlson played knight a3 five months ago he played knight a3 but i'm not going to look at that you got to look at that okay if if super gms are doing things that are unusual you got to be ready for them and those guys work all day and all night making sure they don't lose out of the opening and they know what they're doing and the sicilian has a lot of interesting ideas that you can come up with on your own you don't have to play the open sicilian night off line that your favorite player plays you can play anything you want and i remember a guy i think he was from ohio when he played the the close sicilian you know like knight c3 and g3 he didn't play knight c3 he would play d3 then he'd play knight d2 then he'd play c3 and then f4 knight here sometimes he'd play bishop each time he fianchetto and you know his opponents weren't booked up on that they you know d3 who's looking at d3 so he was getting the same kinds of positions over and over again that he liked and his opponents were in new territory and the best thing you can do in any opening is come up with things that you like if you're like well kasparov did this 25 years ago and he beat this portish and i memorized that game now i'm going to show everybody that's probably not going to happen right probably there's more theory since then your opponent's not going to play 20 moves a theory but if you have your own variations that are often just as good as the main lines have your pet variations the problem with a lot of class players today is their pet variations sacrifice all their pieces i'm like why'd you give up your night oh yeah i do that all the time you can have your own variation which almost nobody plays that you play all the time that doesn't lose material it's not necessary to lose material to make it your own variation although it does make it more likely other people don't want to lose material and i'll end with something sort of funny i guess um you know it about 40 years ago 50 years ago uh international master danny kopeck who also died a few years ago he he invented the kopec system bishop d3 confusing the audience okay and he wanted to play castles c3 bishop c2 d4 that's what he did and people are like bishop d3 what's that and he's like that's the kopec system i'm kopeck okay and you know he made up his own thing and it's it's reasonable i mean i could play reasonable moves for both sides i'm a reasonable kind of guy e6 here and y's position looks okay and the idea is the bishop is protecting this pawn if it was on e2 or c4 it wouldn't be doing that and a lot of lopez is we see bishop here bishop here bishop here so it's not so crazy but he like you know he invented his own thing and he's like bishop d3 nobody knows that so you can play offbeat stuff that maybe somebody else invented or you can invent your own offbeat stuff or you can study this sicilian for hours and hours and hours study it more than your opponent and beat them out of the opening because you know more theory than they do that's not what i do but you could do that if you want it takes a lot of work to play the opening correctly and if you decide the sicilian that's a popular opening i'll play that and that's your preparation i mean the preparation is hours and hours of study of these variations so you know what you're doing that's why playing your own variation with white or black is what i recommend because you'll be familiar with it and your opponent probably won't and don't do things that are intentionally bad just do things that you like it's a very difficult opening and that's why all the world champions were playing it because they want to win they want to set problems for their opponents they study chess all the time they have great preparation and occasionally a super grandmaster gets crushed from the sicilian because it's so complicated his opponent now prepared him well that's the sicilian and i usually have black but sometimes i have white especially on my stream it's much more likely it's a blitz game if i have white i mean when i was a kid i played d4 it's not my fault cheshtakov was right um so thanks for watching today and this is again grand master ben feingold here at the chess club in scholastic center of atlanta please like and subscribe and also let's once again thank our generous donor sponsor robert that you're the best until the next guy donates see you next time [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Atlanta

Views: 185,532

Keywords: CCSCATL, Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Atlanta, chess, Atlanta, Georgia, ben, finegold, gm finegold, gm ben finegold, best chess openings, the sicilian defense

Id: nR_AiAfkM-U

Length: 53min 52sec (3232 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021