The Sicilian Defense - Part 1

Contrary to popular stereotyping, the Sicilian Defense does not involve putting a severed horse's head in your opponent's bed the night before the game. It's not that I'm averse to using any possible tactic in order to win a Chess game, but publicly acknowledging you're aware of the horse's-head theme, and then using it, might be injurous to future defense proceedings in a court of law. Dammit. Please ignore that I just said that.

I've tried playing the Sicilian before, and came to the conclusion that even when I can make it work, it just looks plain ugly. I suppose there's a reason for that; unlike the delicious subtlety of the French where you build a "tortoise-shell" like pawn structure then explode with energy on the counter-attack, the idea in the Sicilian is to take the game to White from the get-go and launch an attack from the outset. Both players attack simultaneously and 'thrice blessed is he who gets his blow in first'.

I've determined to learn the Scheveningen system of the Sicilian, and not least because I happen to have a book on the subject by some guy called G. Kasparov. The Najdorf is too critical for my talents just yet, the Shveshnikov / Kalishnikov / Pelikan too wild, and Dragon players have always struck me as being 'one-trick ponies' - fianchetto the King's Bishop then play Rc8xNc3 and pretend to understand the resultant complications.

Sicilian Scheveningen
Black's ideal setup

This is Black's ideal, and in practice probably unattainable, setup. The Nc6 plans to travel via a5 to c4 next. As (formerly) a 1. e4 player, I always enjoyed locking horns with the open Sicilian directly, employing such ideas as the Keres Attack (early g4), the Wing Gambit (again Keres idea with d4 and Bd3 before formalising the gambit with a3), the surprisingly fierce 6. Be2, and h3 in response to ... a6 in the Najdorf. As a youth I stumbled upon the basic idea against the Shveshnikov over the board; Ndb5-a3-c2-e3 and lock onto the weakened d5 square for all you're worth. Mostly I want to play the Sicilian to learn what I'm missing.

In reality as compared to the ideal position, Black will probably face some weakening of the King-side by being forced to play ... g7xf6 and the Queen's Bishop might well end up on d7 rather than b7; White has stock combinations based on B/Nxe6. For a long time the "Maroczy Bind" was considered a refutation to the Sicilian, and it was one of those setups that you so often hear talked about without ever getting a discussion of the underlying idea. It turns out that by building a brick wall with a pawn on c4, White's strategy is to hold up Black's attack down the c-file. In return, Black has many dark-square weaknesses to exploit in the White camp.

My FICS experience is that many amateurs prefer to avoid mainline open Sicilians, opting for the Grand Prix Attack (early f4), or the Alapin / Morra-Smith lines with 2. c3, so time spent examining those ideas may be more profitable in a practical sense than drudging through theoretical lines in the Scheveningen. And then of course there's the King's Indian Attack to consider, which my team-mate Mejdanblues has more or less made his own to the point that in some circles it is now referred to as the KIA-Blues Attack.