welcome everybody to another 10 minute chess opening video i've been requested to do this
by so many people uh the english opening with the white pieces the english starts with the move c4
and the real question is why would one play the english when you are supposed to play the queen's
pawn the king's pawn early on well first of all the english cuts back probably 90 to 95 percent
of familiarity for your opponents so they're used to playing something against d4 against e4 all of
a sudden they have the english the other thing about the english is that it avoids certain move
orders it can avoid certain openings for example if you want to play d4 but you have an opponent
who wants to play the nimso indian with bishop b4 the english avoids that and it you know knight f6
knight c3 e6 you know now your center is ready and you can play the move e4 right and then
obviously black here cannot play a nimb so indian for example another example of avoiding a certain
opening theory is for example in this move order if let's say they want to play a grunfeld
you can play e4 and shut that down and often times this results in you getting a position where
they have to play king's indian defense so the english can be used to solve certain move orders
uh while at the same time allowing you to play more flexibly with potentially g3 and bishop g2
now to that point there are two ways that you can play the english opening there is the two nights
english where you put two knights in the center of the board sometimes you try to push your d-pawn a
little bit later or there's the english where you immediately play g3 bishop g2 and you actually put
this knight on e2 so black can obviously set up in a million different ways the english doesn't
really control the center too much so black can play e5 this is a reverse sicilian defense
because it's basically like e4 c5 except you're playing the sicilian and you have an extra move
we actually saw this played a ton between magnus carlsen and hikaru nakamura in the recently
concluded finals if you haven't caught up on those recaps or those videos i highly recommend you go
look at them uh and magnus played a lot of g3 and bishop g2 but he did play some knight c3 knight f6
and the four knights english where you can now play moves like e3 to try to play d4 or
g3 bishop g2 and so on and so forth in this video i'm not going to go into a crazy amount of theory
because there is some theory but i want to intro this whole opening to you and potentially tell
you about the overarching themes and plans so let's say you do get e5 and you can play g3 let's
say something like knight f6 and then here you would continue with something like bishop to g2
and again black can set up in a million different ways black can play in the center first if black
plays in the center you should obviously make this trade and then continue with your development
consider tufi and ketos at some point you can play b3 bishop b2 uh that's also very useful
to to put some pressure on the center with the bishops and you will delay your central
development for a little bit black doesn't play like that just plays knight c6 you play knight c3
say this bishop goes somewhere you know maybe bishop c5 maybe bishop e7 maybe you get a bishop
b4 uh always consider that you do have moves like knight to d5 but you can decide very early how
you want to set up in this setup you can play e3 92 just hypothetically speaking what that might
look like something like this and then from here your game plan with white will basically be to
complement this bishop and expand on that side of the board so something like you know for example
bishop e6 right to try to pressure this pawn now here you could play b3 but i already did show you
that you support that with a knight you support that with the pawn the knight in the bishop and
so you could launch that knight into the center and begin to expand with space on the queen side
so again perfect world what does that look like just to make a few moves here um a3 bishop a5
b4 and so on maybe you'll put the rook on b1 for example and support the advancement of these pawns
maybe in the future you will also expand in the center with d4 very flexible setup now what is
a good plan for black well there's going to be positions where black will play something like
you know bishop g you know bishop f5 uh and let's say you play you play this little setup here and
then here you play something like bishop b2 black will try to play queen d7 an experienced player
will do this and try to trade off your bishop so a useful maneuver to know there is rookie one
you say well how does that prevent this trade well here you can sometimes play the move bishop h1 and
so rook e1 has moved the rook excuse me out of the way of this dark square of the light squad bishop
the black bishop i should say now you hide on e1 uh h1 not e1 you put the rook on e1 bishop on h1
and you play d4 and try to trap that bishop on b6 take a lot of space put the knight in the center
of the board and so on that's one way but if you want to challenge your opponent's setup you really
have to with the english notice very early on how they're trying to set up their pieces so for me
i actually don't play g3 when i play c4 uh what i do is my next move is almost always knight c3
so if they play knight f6 i'll play knight c3 i'm looking at how they're developing if they play e6
i'm gonna play e4 if they play e5 then that's fine that's basically the reverse sicilian now you can
go for your g3 thing or your two knight setup like this uh if they play g6 and it's like oh well now
i don't want them to play the grunfeld i want to play into a king's indian so maybe you need a
king's indian line in your repertoire for example a line that i like very much in the king's indian
is the two bishop line where you play bishop e2 castles and bishop e3 notice in the english you
haven't moved this knight yet and what this allows you to do is to play g4 h4 h5 so before you even
develop your knight you're already attacking you're gonna play queen d2 maybe bishop h6 and
you're trying to put some pressure on a king's indian player recognizing how they're playing as
the game progresses it wouldn't be an english uh video if i you know didn't tell you about probably
the most annoying thing that you'll face in the english which is the symmetrical english there are
players that just will copy you because you know maybe they play they play e4 e5 they play d4d5
so against the english they don't really have an opening so they play c4 c5 that might happen
what i recommend against this is the bot vinnick setup i believe with the black pieces that's what
it's called but you can play with the white pieces as well knight c3 and then again g3 bishop g2 you
can get copied the entire way now sometimes here some of the super grand masters have experimented
with an early h4 push mdl aronian they'll play like h4 black might still copy but then you can
transfer your knight to like f4 for example rather than just developing naturally with knight h3
the symmetrical english is pretty annoying uh it's you know there's no way around it it's
actually fundamentally one of the drawbacks of playing the english is that they can just copy you
and black should be fine how many people are gonna do that against you i really can't predict
uh but obviously i should tell you it it might happen and uh against that you can just try to
play on the queen side rook b1 a3 b4 you can play this early h4 thing uh you can play the
bot vinix setup which i was saying with e4 and then something like this so this little
carousel or or a carousel a bowl of pawns i i don't know i was gonna say like a little
you know little carton of of pawns i i'm running out of words all right it's like 11 o'clock at
night when i'm recording this i'm kind of tired i don't know why i said carousel maybe it's because
it like kind of goes like this whatever let's just move on basically you play something like 92
d6 maybe h3 here so you can put your bishop here because if you just put your bishop there
i'll attack it and take it so you're just trying to keep very solid very flexible setup
black plays something like a6 looking for b5 maybe you castle maybe you play queen
d2 and go for bishop h6 your flexibility is unlimited with the english and oftentimes
you will be building up your experience in this opening while they have not faced this so often
um against something that's a little bit more confrontational against this pawn like e6 or c6
again you can play g3 d5 and bishop g2 if you've seen my catalan video this will be very useful
giving away this pawn is really not dangerous you can often times combine the english with
the catalan if you're interested in playing the english i highly recommend looking at
the catalan video as well because the positions are very similar you'll win this pawn back very
easily with moves like queen a4 check sometimes knight a3 knight c4 and even just knight f3
castles and knight e5 and taking back this pawn because defending it will result in
some damage on this diagonal the loss of material is probably the most obvious
that's pretty much it uh the english is it it's you know i don't always recommend it for
beginners and intermediate players because in my opinion there's not enough tactics but if you're
a player who likes a slower game where you don't want to get caught with some stupid opening trap
the english is perfect for you hope that helps i don't really need much more than 10 minutes for
this one a couple of videos are going to appear on that side you can feel free to check them out
got a lot of content on this channel let me know your thoughts in the comments below maybe uh
drop me a game that you've played in the english i'll catch you in the next video