Why the French Defence?

Every chess player has a favourite opening, one that they warm to and it seems to never let them down. This opening suits their style and the way they want to play and for me it is the French Defence.

My fascination started with a link to my favourite piece: the Knight. What else eh? The knight is such a unique piece, nothing else moves like it, many people struggle to see the routes it can take and we have all lost to a tricky knight fork. When younger I used to love stories about King Arthur and knights of the round table, this piece really is a close quarter battler jumping in and out causing absolute havoc. But how to maximise the use of this piece?

Knights thrive when they have good outposts and usually in closed positions. Lets take a look at an example of a closed position....

I wonder, can you see how the knights should develop from here?

It's this placement of the knight that started to interest me, almost asking white what are they going to do about it - and they can try a few things for sure, here is one brute force example:

Here is another line of the French that becomes even more closed, can you see the outposts the knight wants to go to?

With blacks last move of c4 we cement the b3 square as an excellent outpost for our knight and it often does go there!

So because of my love of knights when I picked up a book by Lev Psakhis on the French I was naturally enthralled by the possibilities of this opening. It's not the most common but still sits in the top group of openings choices. If you are ready to move on from playing e5 then the French will give you fighting chances and new types of pawn structures to play.

Let's take a quick look at some statistics for how the main openings do, below are all from the lichess database of rapid & blitz games only.

First for ratings 1000 & 1200:

If you are still responding with e5 to e4 it's 'ok' - but you are missing out on the opportunity to do something different to everyone else on move 1. Bring your opponent into your game whether it be the French with e6 or even the Caro (c6) or Sicilian (c5). I'm actually surprised by how popular the Scandinavian (d5) is here, albeit like e5 it isn't scoring well.

Moving up the rating ranges on rapid & blitz we look at 1400 & 1600...

You'll notice that the Scandinavian is less popular as the French has moved up a place but the trend of e5 not scoring well in comparison continues. In both these stats we even see the Sicilian is winning more games for black than white wins which is crazy!

What do you expect at the ratings of 1800 & 2000....

You can see that the overall percentage of players playing e5 is dropping off massively. The Scandinavian moves further down in popularity but the trend of e5 scoring badly in comparison STILL continues.

What about at the very top level, here I selected the 2200 & 2500 rating ranges...

Well the first thing to notice is that responding with 1...e5 is NOT the most popular response with many preferring the Sicilian. Funnily enough all openings score roughly the same percentages and are decent options when you know what you are doing.

Summary

If you are rated 1000-1600 and respond to 1.e4 with 1...e5 then I would definitely be looking to learn and play something different. I'm a little biased in recommending the French however the Caro-Kann and the ever popular Sicilian options are also good. If you do reach the heavy heights of 2200+ then it doesn't matter what opening you play as everyone knows what to do against all the main choices.

If you want to try to play new pawn structures that are closed then the French is a great option. I enjoy maneuvering my knights around and I hope you will too.

Whatever you decide, good luck and I hope it works!