January 21, 2003

International Grand Master Yasser Seirawan says strategy "is the purposeful pursuit of a simple goal: to gain an advantage of some sort over your opponent" (4). As delineated by Seirawan, these advantages can be more material, superior piece mobility, superior pawn structure, more territory, or a safer king position. Any chess game you play should have as its long-term goal the establishment of one or several of these advantages. If you're not looking to create these opportunities for yourself, but are instead just moving pieces in the hope that your opponent will blunder, you will never get very far with your chess game.

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Openings

Despite the overwhelming number of possible positions during the course of a chess game, there's still only a limited number of ways a game can be started, and of those, only a select number of moves (called "openings") are good. Fortunately for the modern chess player these openings have been researched and catalogued. What follows are various brief commentaries on different openings and the advantages and disadvantages associated with each. Additional opening line information can be found in Modern Chess Openings-14 (edited by DeFirmian).

If you would like to comment on my analysis or discuss different lines of play which I've neglected, by all means email me. I'm always happy to discuss chess strategy, and I'd be thrilled to post your contributions on the web site if appropropriate.

B35 Sicilian, Accelerated Fianchetto, Modern Variation with Bc4 (aka Accelerated Dragon)

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Works Cited

Seirawan, Yasser with Jeremy Silman. Winning Chess Strategies. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1994.

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