Although I typically group unpopular openings into the “Other” category, I wanted to point out the short-lived spike in popularity of the Pirc Defence in the 1850s. In 1850, it was standard fare for Black to match the ever-popular King’s Pawn by moving a Pawn to e5 (the Open Game). Many of Black’s opening moves are more defensive in nature and attempt to undermine White’s initial advantage. The 1920s saw another burst of innovation with the rising popularity of the Zukertort Opening (moving the Knight to f3) and the English Opening (moving a Pawn to c4), which completed the set of staple first-turn openings that are really ever used nowadays. Chess players didn’t begin to explore variants of the King’s Pawn in earnest until the 1890s, when Queen’s Pawn (moving a Pawn to d4) started to replace King’s Pawn in some player’s repertoires. In 1850, White openings were fairly homogeneous: Most chess experts played King’s Pawn. Note that all of these are fairly aggressive openings that build toward control of the middle of the board. The most popular first White moves from 1850-2014 are shown below. To maintain this advantage, White should press their advantage to take over the middle of the board as quickly as possible.

It’s a well-known fact that White has a small advantage at the beginning of the game.

For this analysis, I’ll look at the openings in four classes: White’s first move, Black’s first move, White’s second move, and Black’s second move. With a bit of text parsing, I can count the number of times each chess opening was used on a per-game basis. Hundreds of openings have been developed since 1850, so it should make for an interesting exercise to see how these openings have evolved since then.Įach chess game is recorded in PGN format, which means that it stores every move each player made, the outcome of the game, etc. It’s therefore no surprise that one of the key steps to becoming a skilled chess player is studying and memorizing the many varieties of openings. If you don’t start off with a good opening, you could doom yourself to defeat before the game really even begins. The first few moves of a chess game, known as the chess opening, are one of the most-studied aspects of the game, largely because of how important they can be. Again, I only have reliable data on chess games back to 1850, so 1850 will be my starting point. For the 3rd installment in my series of blog posts exploring a data set of over 650,000 chess tournament games ranging back to the 15th century, I wanted to look at how chess openings have grown and waned in popularity over time.

Pgn chess opening moves