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Comment by JesseAldridge | Hacker News Reader

I played chess at a low level for about a year. I very quickly learned to despise the Fried Liver Attack. It's the cannon rush of the Chess world: very easy to execute while relatively difficult to defend against. There's a huge, complex world of chess strategy, but before you can get to that you have to learn like every Fried Liver variation because beginners will use it over and over.

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The dominance of formulaic application of opening theory over improvisation is a problem at all levels of chess. Bobby Fischer crafted chess960, a variant on shuffle chess, to deal with it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960#History

> Fischer's goal was to eliminate what he considered the complete dominance of openings preparation in classical chess, replacing it with creativity and talent. His belief about Russians fixing international games also provided motivation. In a situation where the starting position was random it would be impossible to fix every move of the game. Since the "opening book" for 960 possible opening systems would be too difficult to devote to memory, the players must create every move originally. From the first move, both players must devise original strategies and cannot use well-established patterns. Fischer believed that eliminating memorized book moves would level the playing field.

I think this is not really true at all. Yasser Seirawan has written and lectured extensively about playing variations of the English & 1. Nf3 openings as white, and King’s Indian Defense and various Pirc / French / Caro-Kann lines that allow either player to pretty much veer out of theory-heavy variations and reach early positions in which there are no sharp tactical edges to the game and your opponent could not generally have forced any without entering a dramatically losing position.

The popularity of Fried Liver Attack among beginners in the US is puzzling to me. When I was learning chess (in Europe), I was told not to waste time on it since it's not a "serious" opening. With black you just need to know to play Na5, sidestepping all this drama with black king in the center.

Or play Bc5, though you have to face the Evans Gambit occasionally.

I gave up playing 1...e5 because it's akin to asking white to smack you over the face with their favorite variation which they practiced to perfection while black has to learn dozens of variations to cover what white can throw at them.

This Fried Liver thing is the least of black's problems.

reading this i realized i haven't played e5 in years, pretty much never looked back after i started learning the french

The French can be a great choice for black in the right hands. White often plays for a quick attack on the king side with Qg4 while risking losing control of the center. Allow black to get a rook on c8 with an open c file after c5 x d4 and black is looking good.

That's true if you want to play 1...e5 against 1.e4, but you don't have to. Obviously, every opening has its various traps and cheeses, but if you hated the fried liver so much, why not try the sicilian or the french?

Haha, I'll be honest, I have no idea what the sicilian or french is. I just played casually on the weekends.

This is funny as I'm a beginner who has played plenty of the French and plenty of other openings like Queen's Gambit and Scicilian, but have never heard of Fried Liver. So we're the same, but total opposites.

Or you could just play Na5 instead of Nxd5?

It difficult to make as comparison to the star craft cannon rush because chess is a game of perfect information and the cannon rush in star craft relies on incomplete information to work effectively

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