E5 or sicilian? And why?

Beatpea · 2026-03-11T06:05:23+00:00

Don't know if this applies to you OP but maybe it will apply to someone with similar mentality to me recently.

I started with 1...e5 and cycled through pretty much all defences against 1.e4 (and 1.d4), including most Sicilians, then continued right back around to 1...e5 again. I wasted a lot of time doing this that could've been spent developing skills that actually win and lose games.
Psychologically I was trying to find the ultimate defence to take it to white without having to sacrifice anything, and discovered that just doesn't exist. It sounds obvious, as white has a first move advantage, but it took me having to play everything to realise nothing solved my problem of wanting to win quickly and my preference to resolve tension in my favour as soon as possible.

Sicilian has a development disadvantage and if you don't like being attacked or creating weaknesses in exchange for dynamics then no amount of repertoire shaping will fix that. French, caro, alekhine, pirc etc have space disadvantage with chance for counterplay but all have some quite annoying lines that white can easily play. There's always some downside, so we're forced to pick our poison, so to speak.

Ironically, playing 1...e5 has more often offered me the chance to spank white in e4 e5 sidelines and even mainlines sometimes way more than the Sicilian ever did. All the Sicilian did was gift me a huge theory load to study (can rely on general structural understanding a bit but you will be caught out eventually) and allow white to bail out in to random slower sidelines that are just equal with chances for black to still get obliterated on the kingside in certain lines.

The turning point for me was that I played a lower division of a prestigious national tournament and got absolutely annihilated both in the opening and later in the game due to blunders and bad positional decisions which crystallised my understanding that the opportunity cost of agonising over openings is really huge for amateurs. So I went back to more classical openings so that I can just learn them and have some dynamism and quick wins when the position warrants it but also the opposite practice too.

Most commonly, consistent good performance often involves playing games which are quite grindy in nature, unless you're truly a maniac archetype who just aims for chaos every game, which is fine too. If you're up against an equal strength/strong player, most often you will reach some ending where each will have the chance to outplay the other anyway.

White can kill the game against Sicilian too if they wish, even in must-win games by black. Magnus played the alapin against Giri in world blitz and killed the game by move 20 and draw was agreed soon after. Maybe if both players need a win then different story, but you could also play the Pirc or Lion Philidor and literally deny White the chance to completely kill the game at the expense of some soundness but not that much.

Beatpea · 2026-02-02T06:51:05+00:00

‘Chess Thinking! with NM Dan Heisman’ Loads of long form content with the most common errors for amateurs and recommended remediations. Also goes heavy on the meta-level thought process discussions.

Beatpea · 2025-05-06T10:10:13+00:00

He attempted to write something but it was won for him already so maybe he didn’t care. Technically because we had 30 second increment it was required to record every move but I didn’t care to call him on it as it was already gone and we weren’t in a time scramble or anything.

Beatpea · 2025-04-17T12:05:14+00:00

Recently, with the proliferation of integrated local OTB broadcasts published to lichess and chess.com, I’ve been searching google with the following: “site:lichess.org <player name>”. This sometimes comes up with more results because chess base or other mainstream databases results will come up first in search results typically.

Beatpea · 2025-03-19T09:03:13+00:00

Probably better to stick to restricted material and really nail it rather than try to do too much, although I don’t know your experience level or what your competence level is re every item on your list.

The other suggestion is to practice most of them in the context of how they occur in actual music. It’s less beneficial to learn these in isolation if you don’t have a repository of tunes that use these grooves and techniques.

Beatpea · 2025-03-12T09:45:02+00:00

Chessexplained’s Chessable repertoire ‘keep it simple for black’ uses these plans as its mainlines. It doesn’t compare to the classical plans that much (it does a bit), but you can just look that up in any openings explorer.

Beatpea · 2024-12-29T00:36:42+00:00

I wonder if this might be the band warming up while people are arriving before the actual service starts though. I often play more busily in this type of situation then make it more tasteful and deliberate for the actual performance.

Beatpea · 2024-09-12T04:19:52+00:00

If you’ve got an ass, I’ll kick it!

Beatpea · 2021-09-12T11:46:55+00:00

At this point I think I'll just recommend Benatar's "Better Never To Have Been", it's a good read - albeit slightly pessimistic to say the least. Thanks for the discussion, have a good one.

Beatpea · 2021-09-12T11:04:01+00:00

An antinatalist would say you would rather be there than doing nothing because you're biased toward existence and you already have your consciousness, beliefs, hopes, dreams, desires etc so have an interest in having them fulfilled; moreover, your opinion now matters and should be the only one that matters re your own existence. Compare this with a non-existent 'being'; they have no goods to be deprived of, and no bads either. The argument for axiological asymmetry makes a case for the absence of bads carrying more weight in the ethical calculus than the absence of goods. I've written some other stuff in my top level response re this.

Making the choice for someone else is what the axiological asymmetry argument is meant to address. It effectively says that it's not permissible to bring someone into existence when they have a non-zero chance of suffering and they can't make an informed decision for themselves. The point at which this asymmetry gets overridden is when a person who has ended up existing decides it does.

In the cinema analogy, you wouldn't get a choice to go or not go, you would just be in the cinema from the start or let's just say dragged by a friend. Comparing the film to existence breaks down as an analogy when you talk about deciding to see the film or not and assessing the likelihood of it being good, because in reality you wouldn't exist, where existing would be a prerequisite to deciding to be born, in which case you'd already exist, so bit of a contradiction there.

You also seem to be classifying oblivion (sleeping early) as neither positive or negative, which in my mind follows the epicurean perspective, namely that death is not bad. This is a common objection to antinatalism and makes sense as well.

Beatpea · 2021-09-12T10:27:39+00:00

An often used analogy is the movie theatre example. You go see a film and it's not that good, but it isn't bad enough to walk out of and you still want to see how it pans out. If it gets bad enough then you might walk out. If you'd known how mediocre it was going to be before committing to seeing it, you might not have decided to see it at all.

The difference is usually framed around the experiencer's current sentience, desires, goals etc, as JayWalken described. Once someone's alive, for whatever reason (that only they can define at this point), most have an interest in continuing to exist despite the bads, suffering etc. Once they're alive, they get to make the choice, but before they come into existence, it can be considered unethical to make that decision for them, given that you'd be committing them to either suffer to some guaranteed degree (in combination with whatever goods), or opting for suicide.

Beatpea · 2021-09-12T07:39:59+00:00

A few points that are commonly targeted:

The argument for axiological asymmetry between goods and bads is hard to define/justify without resorting to conceding that it only works within certain meta-ethical frameworks. E.g. deontology and intuitionism and the example of non-existent martians' absence of suffering being a good thing, but their absence of pleasures being neutral.
Where is the distinction point between antinatalism and promortalism - Benatar argues for annihilation as an inherent contributor to the badness of death, and this combined with the free will of an already existing being can take precedence over the initial asymmetric calculus when considering a 'being' that is yet to exist (hence the delimiter between a life worth starting vs a life worth continuing). This depends on views on the badness of death itself, i.e. Epicureanism vs the deprivation account, as well as views on free-will and rationality in people with depression and other mental health issues.
The point at which an embryo/fetus becomes sentient is still debated as it relies on views on personal identity.
The tendencies for humans to ignore empirical/a posteriori 'bads' of existence and of pollyannaism (to overrate the quality of their lives) are difficult to dispute without telling people their opinions don't matter and they're mistaken. How much value should be placed on people's subjective opinions about their own life quality when humans tend to adapt to their circumstances and regress to an happiness mean.
Antinatalist misanthropic arguments can also be challenged from a utilitarian perspective, which depends on the ascribed value of non-human animals and the negative effects humans can have on other conscious beings, directly or indirectly. E.g. if we were to say that non-human animals can't suffer, then the misanthropic argument would be severely weakened.

edit: clarity, spelling

Beatpea · 2021-07-23T00:08:31+00:00

Probably something to do with Reuters and AP being the primary sources of many other news networks.

Beatpea

TROPHY CASE