1.d4 lovers must read this!

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AchillesYouTube

Hi people! 1.d4 has emerged from languish in the shadows of dubious moves to the second most played move today after 1.e4 . As time passes, more and more people will lean towards 1.d4 because even though I hear a lot saying that 1.e4 is an attacking players opening and 1.d4 is a positional/strategic players opening, that is simply not the case. The truth is in fact that 1.d4 creates more chances for white than 1.e4 and even traditional chess engines and AIs will agree on that. At a depth of 69 (which was the max all of them attained in 60-65 hours of running hardware with all cores since my PC became too hot) which is the maximum depth at which I ran both Komodo 10, StockFish 10 and the most used version of Leela Chess (essentially every engine I had access to for free), all agreed upon this line:

1.d4 Nf6 Nf3 (preferred over c4 for some reasons) e6 c4 d4 (Of course we transpose into the Queen's Gambit Declined) Nc3 Be7.

Let me know what you think about this line and the preference of Nf3 on the 2nd move as opposed to c4. And the 69 depth is not a joke (;

notmtwain
AchillesYouTube wrote:

Hi people! 1.d4 has emerged from languish in the shadows of dubious moves to the second most played move today after 1.e4 . As time passes, more and more people will lean towards 1.d4 because even though I hear a lot saying that 1.e4 is an attacking players opening and 1.d4 is a positional/strategic players opening, that is simply not the case. The truth is in fact that 1.d4 creates more chances for white than 1.e4 and even traditional chess engines and AIs will agree on that. At a depth of 69 (which was the max all of them attained in 60-65 hours of running hardware with all cores since my PC became too hot) which is the maximum depth at which I ran both Komodo 10, StockFish 10 and the most used version of Leela Chess (essentially every engine I had access to for free), all agreed upon this line:

1.d4 Nf6 Nf3 (preferred over c4 for some reasons) e6 c4 d4 (Of course we transpose into the Queen's Gambit Declined) Nc3 Be7.

Let me know what you think about this line and the preference of Nf3 on the 2nd move as opposed to c4. And the 69 depth is not a joke (;

1 d4 never languished as a bad move, at least as far as I am aware.  (If you were to try to rehabilitate 1 d3, that would be a different matter.)

It is not true that AI and regular engines agree that  d4 "creates more chances." Where did you hear that?

I think you are wasting electricity if you set your computer to such tasks.  If you have free power, you would be far better off mining bitcoin.

AchillesYouTube

My PC is fine after I let it cool down and in fact it was running with a cooling fan the whole time. I would say that it would take about a weeks time before anyone can reach a depth of 99 which is the maximum for the programs. As for 1.d4 creating more chances, my research supports that. 1.d4 is without a doubt whites best first move because establishment of a pawn immediately in the centre and staying flexible with piece deployment is key to gaining the upper hand. In fact it had an evaluation of +0.3 and second was 1.Nf3 with +0.2 because it allows 1. ..c5 for black which at best allows white to transpose into a Sicilian defense or symmetrical English with best play from both sides. 1.e3 is possible but whites advantage comes from an expansive setup with pawns on d4 and c4 right from moves 1 and 2. And for more statistics, 1.c4 is third with the same evaluation of +0.2 and 1.e4 comes at a third with +0.1. The fifth best move was apparently 1.e3 which would transpose into inferior variations of 1.d4.