How to Spot the Sicilian Opening in a Chess Game

Video Transcript

"Now we come to the last of the King's pawn openings that I intend to cover in this brief overview. And this is far and away the most common alternative for black to play as opposed to pawn to King's four; it is the so called Sicilian Opening. And the Sicilian Opening is a game that leads to very sharp play. There are many variants of it, new one's coming out all the time, and really both players have to be very conversant with it if this opening is going to be played because you can go under pretty quickly if you play it incorrectly. There are, in fact, things like books written about one single variant of the Sicilian response so it shows you how key it is in modern day chess. But, without getting into all this great complexity, the basic game starts like this. Pawn to King's four again from white; and the black Sicilian response, Pawn to Queen's bishop four. And from here many different things can happen as I mentioned. Usually the players would go into a thing called the classical Dragon, well, I say usually. Most commonly whites next move would be to this; King's bishop three, which leads towards the so called Dragon variation of the opening. And the typical black response at this point would be this. Now, the idea of this game is that black concentrates primarily on attacking the Queen's side; and white continues to focus more on the King's side but has to, as I said earlier, be extremely careful and cautious about what is happening on the Queen's side of the board. And if you do decide, as you develop as a chess player, that you want to start playing the Sicilian defense, you want to study it pretty carefully before you actually get out there at any sort of competitive level and use it."