The English Rat

The English Rat is an interesting opening.

I see it a lot in blitz when playing white. Every time I think I should be able to take advantage: black forfeits the right to castle and leaves their king sitting in the middle. However, it's somehow counter-intuitive. I find that I struggle against it with the white pieces.

Even at high levels the opening works. The database shows that statistically it heavily favors black.

I'm not a good enough player to really understand why. With queens off the board it is difficult to take advantage of black's inability to castle, but I never feel like black has great attacking chances either. 

I think you should imagine the position without the queen's on the board and nothing moved yet... just look at the difference in the white/black bishops.  Black has all the pawns out of the way and is quick to develop.  Their knights will come to f6 and c6 without delay.  White on the other hand has one bishop sealed inside.  Probably playing dxe5 is a mistake and statistics are quite poor for white in all those lines.  Kasporov used Nf3 instead and Karpov Nc3.  I think there is a clear difference there in the position where white is going to retain his space advantage without the development lag.  Exchanging material just gives black a more active game.  I do not think this is 'winning' for black, but statistics are certainly good for them if the pawn is captured.  

Black has a very reasonable game.  The White pawn on c4 does not help White's development.  This type of queenless middlegame is often used by stronger players with Black to outplay weaker Whites that rush into this hoping for an easy draw.

I think the favourable percentage for black has two main reasons:

1. The player on the white side does not really know what he does; there are better continuations for him after 2 ... e5
2. Black has a much easier game than white, it is easier for him to come up with a decent plan and his king in the center is not just safe (because the queens are gone) but it is also an active piece supporting other black pieces and preventing white from intruding via the d-file.

Here's an "English Rat" game of mine with black, not a perfect one, but still a nice example. The chosen setup with ... f6, ... c6, ... Kc7 and later ... a5 is very typical (I looked it up in games of better players )

Of course I also lost games playing the "English Rat".

I got two books which discuss the "English Rat", both are okay (but not excellent)

• An Explosive Chess Opening Repertoire for Black by Jouni Yrjölä, Jussi Tella
• 1...D6: Move by Move (Everyman Chess) by Cyrus Lakdawala