Maybe I just haven't spent enough time with E5 but I find myself getting my pieces pinned, stumbling over each other and blundering the game away. At least with the Sicilian I feel like I can blunder on my own terms.
At what point did you feel comfortable breaking away from the "usual" openings and exploring?
May I recommend the Caro Kann?
I play e5 and happy about it. Whatever works for you is best tho.
@Finnfinity I have personally never played it but I certainly am not opposed. Is it relatively intuitive to play or would you recommend a bit of study first?
"... As [First Steps: 1 e4 e5 is] a First Steps book, I’ve tried to avoid encyclopaedic coverage. In any case, you certainly don’t need to remember every single variation and all the notes before playing the opening. Take in the first few moves and the key ideas, and then try it out in your games! ..." - GM John Emms (2018) https://www.newinchess.com/media/wysiwyg/product_pdf/7790.pdf
Play the Scandinavian , you have the positional and the gambit version.
@kindaspongey Big thanks for you
@MisterKobe I honestly didn't know that was considered to be a real opening. I recall seeing people play it at a low level, or at least some wandering queen version, and they seemed to fish for early mate and I was not impressed. I looked over a couple studies and I was pleasantly surprised how nice of a position you can have without the overly aggressive queen play
@YAYERZ said in #7:
> @kindaspongey Big thanks for you
>
> @MisterKobe I honestly didn't know that was considered to be a real opening. I recall seeing people play it at a low level, or at least some wandering queen version, and they seemed to fish for early mate and I was not impressed. I looked over a couple studies and I was pleasantly surprised how nice of a position you can have without the overly aggressive queen play
Its a real opening , what is your rating? are you playing against masters? If you have trouble with e5 then how can you say its not a real opening? Openings are relative to ones strenght if you cant play c5 or e5 how can you complain about the scandinavian?
If you are curious about it, give the Sicilian a try. You might like it, or you might not. And in the process, you might learn something (or not). At anything under master levels, learning new openings is a personal journey. (No, I'm not selling aromatherapy or psychic crystals or anything like that) It's about what you learn as you experiment. In a worst case scenario, you can shift to another opening later. And there are a lot of alternatives to choose from.
If you are having problems with tactical vision, (pieces falling over one another, etc) then changing openings isn't really going to fix that. Maybe a bit, because depending on the opening you might find that certain pieces seem to do better on certain natural squares; growing familiarity with the opening and related middlegames will tell you which lines are going to open and which outposts will be strong. But still, in chess tactics proves which plans and ideas work and which don't.
Try the Czech or the Philidor. It‘s an improved e4/e5 - you simply put the pawn there later but keep the strong point e5.
This topic has been archived and can no longer be replied to.