A member of the About Chess forum once asked, 'Does anyone know what openings are the most popular openings?' Our answer at the time was 'it's not possible to talk about opening popularity in absolute terms', and then we listed a number of reasons why we thought it wasn't possible.
(See the link box in the upper right corner of this article for a link to the forum discussion.)
Once in a while we change our opinion about something, and this is one of those times.
In the related article 'Top 10 Popular Chess Openings' (see the link box again), you will find a list of the openings we consider to be the most popular.
How did we determine popularity?
We started with the Opening Explorer at Chessgames.com (link box again).
This is a wonderful tool which lets you drill down on the moves played in a specific opening position.
The moves are ranked according to the number of ~450.000 games (as of mid-December 2005) in which that move was played in the Chessgames.com database.
For example, starting with the initial position, you can select any one of the 20 possible first moves for White.
If you click 1.e4, you will see all the playable (some more playable than others) responses to that move.
Although there are 20 legal responses to 1.e4, there are only 19 in the list; the variation 1.e4 b5 is missing because of 2.Bxb5.
Some players are willing to try any strangeness in the opening, but there are limits!
The following table shows the most popular first moves for White.
| Move |
Games |
| 1.e4 |
170,463 |
| 1.d4 |
120,160 |
| 1.Nf3 |
30,431 |
| 1.c4 |
27,752 |
| 1.g3 |
2,479 |
| 1.f4 |
1,229 |
| [...] |
First, we decided that the first four moves -- 1.e4, 1.d4, 1.Nf3, and 1.c4 -- were played often enough to be called popular.
Since the template we planned to use allowed for 10 openings, we needed to allocate popularity proportionally.
Using the relative numbers, we decided that 1.e4 should get five variations, 1.d4 three variations, and the other two moves one each.
We then looked at the responses to 1.e4, and repeated the process.
Using the numbers there, we decided that the Sicilian should get two variations (1.e4 c5), the Open Game (1.e4 e5) two variations, and the French Defense (1.e4 e6) one variation.
We repeated the process again until we had ten different variations.
There are of course many well loved openings which are not on our list, but there's nothing to stop us from producing similar lists of the top 10 popular responses to 1.e4, or to the Sicilian, or to another opening.
Watch for more articles on popular openings in the future!
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