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Comment by sour-taste | Hacker News Reader

I find it amazing that a game that's so old doesn't have a dominating opening. I see no reason for that to be the case. Maybe it's just a matter of us not having the computational power to find such an opening and analyze it's continuations to completion. I know that there's a huge number of reachable chess states, but it still seems like there could be an opening that always wins.

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The consensus is that white is only guaranteed a draw if it plays perfectly. [1] But that's neither proven or a universal opinion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess

In actual game databases, the first moves of e4, d4 are each played more frequently than all other openings combined, and even of the remainder, Nf3 and c4 strongly dominate the rest. Those four first moves cover about 99% of all games. If you look at black's responses, 1. e4 c5 and 1. e4 e5 dominate, with 1. e4 e6 being the next most popular option, while 1. d4 Nf6 strongly dominates that opening move for white (with 1. d4 d5 the next most popular option).

So, from the perspective of the first move (on each side), given that you can describe almost all games with up to 4 moves out of a possible 20 suggests that there actually is a dominating opening, albeit one a single-move long.

Chess is a very rich and pretty well-balanced game--that's what makes it so rewarding to study and to play. Even amongst modern computers that are miles ahead of the best humans, there's nowhere close to a single dominating opening or set of openings. On the human level, there is already far more computer opening theory than most players (including very serious, titled players) are capable of memorizing, so things haven't gotten stale yet.

Chess is not solved, unlike some other games. There may well be a best opening for each player which ensures some result no matter what your opponent plays. However nobody knows it (including all the wrong variations your opponent can play), so it doesn't matter.

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