The Black Vault

Hump,

I have devised a chess opening that I'm having a lot of success with on RHP. I want to see if you would be willing to analyze it with me. You'd have to get a chessboard out to follow me, but would you like to discuss it?

I want to develop it further and I want to see if you think it is sound.

Let me know, thanks.

Sure thing. I'm a little rusty and out-of-practice, but I'd like to take a look

How many moves are in your opening?

After my first move, all other moves are dictated by opponent's response... IOW I don't think I'd ever use an "opening" that consisted of three or more moves.

If you've found a good one that long or longer, by all means share away...

(I'm at chess.com btw)

A good opening takes into account all opponents reasonable moves for the first 4 turns or more, at1.

It doesn't have to be one strict set of moves, it's like a tree. If he does this, I do this, if he does this, I do this.

Hump, get your chessboard out.

I'm not going to put the response of black for each one, primarily because it hardly matters but secondarily because it's the final formation I want you to look at. This goes deeper than what I'm going to show you, but I don't want to bombard you with ideas and possibilities on the very first message.

Some brief background: I always had a habit of fianchettoing queenside because of the kingside attack possibilities. b3 is the obvious move in that scenario. But I found that in almost all my games, I ended up advancing that b prawn so I thought... why not save myself a tempo and move b4 straight away? That is what spawned this opening, which I have been working on for months, refining, and winning a lot of games:

The Frosty Opening:

1. b4 (usually answered by e5, attacking the prawn)
2. a3
3. Bb2
4. e3
5. Nf3
6. c4
7. Nc3
8. Rc1
9. Bd3
10. Bb1
12. Qc2

I know it seems silly at first to move my bishop to d3 without advancing the d prawn, but again, this is about saving as much tempo as possible. I don't even want to advance that prawn and won't until mid game if necessary.

The simplest idea here is, black obviously dares not castle queenside. However, it (believe it or not) may not be obvious to many people in the heat of the moment, but, castling kingside is quite clearly playing right into my hands....

Your thoughts so far?

I'm going to give you additional theory and also some game examples in an upcoming message.

Hi Frrosted.

This is quite similar to the opening you played against me a while ago, so I take it you're trying to refine the general idea from before?

My honest opinion is that the opening might not work so well against anyone who plays standard textbook chess. In an example I played out, I simply played very standard with black and worked on controlling the center, getting quick piece development, and castling kingside early.

The final position itself looks quite nice, but it doesn't seem like it'd be easy to get into it unless the opponent was accommodating and allowed you to do this? It seems a little slow to me, maybe.

Much better to see it in a game, to see how this plays out.

In the position I got in my standard responses against the opening, it seemed to me that as black my position was pretty okay, I'd rather play black there I think. I could be wrong, it's much better to play over the board to get a better idea of what kinds of problems it poses.

On the plus side, as far as unorthodox openings go it's better than most I've seen, and black can certainly get into some trouble if he isn't careful. I just think strong players will handle it quite easily, exploit it, and you could easily end up worse from the opening. As I say, I could be wrong.

Here is the very basic brief opening I played out to get an idea of how black might look after he has castled kingside (again, a very brief attempt, no real analysis of lines or anything, could easily have made mistakes etc):

1. b4 e5
2. a3 d5
3. bb2 bd6
4. e3 nf6
5. nf3 bg4
6. c4 dxc4
7. bxc4 0-0
8 nc3

I am a big fan of developing all your pieces and castling before you start attacking the opponent, and this is where this fails for me as it doesn't seem that castling is quick or comfortable enough. White could even get into some trouble down that queenside once black can start throwing pawns at him after castling early.

I think this might actually be great against players under 1700 or so, and probably it could be excellent in a blitz game against an unsuspecting opponent.

We should play this out on RHP soon.

NOTE: I changed this post quite a bit from my original comments as the online board I was using forced me to make the moves for black, and I got rather a different position to yours, and I figured you might have meant to castle queenside not kingside.

at1with0 wrote:How many moves are in your opening?

After my first move, all other moves are dictated by opponent's response... IOW I don't think I'd ever use an "opening" that consisted of three or more moves.

If you've found a good one that long or longer, by all means share away...

(I'm at chess.com btw)

If you like openings where it doesn't matter what the opponent does so much, look at the King's Indian for white and black. Any fianchetto opening is going to allow you to more or less stick to your planned moves for 4-5 turns at least.

Post removed as was commenting on a different position to the one you got into. My mistake.

I'll take another look later and see if I can figure out anything that I think would improve it.

I'm looking forward to seeing some example games where you've done well with this too!

I know you want me just to look at the position but I'm finding it hard to assess without actually playing out black's responses.

I have some serious doubts that you can make 12 moves without any regard to what black is doing.

Then again, I haven't done my homework and seeing what position white ends up with after those 12 moves.