My impression has always been that it's down to the difference between a short term initiative that can be quickly neutralised versus niggly long term advantages that are less likely to give quick wins at lower levels, but harder to neutralise especially at high levels.

The main lines Lopez and to a lesser extent the Mieses line of the Scotch give White those niggly long-term advantages that many of the other lines don't.  For instance my pet lines, the Scotch/Goring/Danish gambit complex, rely almost exclusively on a short term initiative and so they notch up a lot of quick wins, especially at mortal levels, but there are many ways to equalise against them.

MNb wrote on 06/22/10 at 11:08:42:


Do you mean that black will equalize with best play in all other open games?

Bibs wrote on 06/22/10 at 00:38:17:

I did not start this poll to elect some politician but to have an idea of what I could play when switching to e4. Basically I want to choose between 4 groups:
- Vienna/King'sGambit
- Bc4 (Italian, 2 Knights, Evans)
- d4 (Scotch (gambit))
- Bb5

(I put the Vienna and the KG in one "group" because of the possible interactions with Nc3 and f4)

kylemeister wrote on 06/19/10 at 22:58:39:


I don't agree with whoever said the Mieses is "insanely complex."  Difficult and often counter-intuitive, yes.  But I think the burden of necessary knowledge is much less there than with the main lines of the Spanish, while propensity to score is, umm, it's debatable, but perhaps not much less.  So I think the Scotch/Mieses ranks second to the Spanish among 1.e4 e5 systems, or at least, a plausible case can be made that it does.

The Italian with d3, well, that's all well and good, but no one can really dispute that theoretically, the Spanish is much better.   

The problem with the poll and with the whole thread is that you have so many people riding their hobby horses.

A few more questions:
- which one of these openings offers the best possibilities of attacking the Black King (I mean quite early i nthe game): Evans, Italian, Ruy Lopez or Scotch?
- for so far I can see, it seems to me that it is difficult for white to get the initiative right from the start in the Two Knights. Is this correct? 

derdudea wrote on 06/20/10 at 19:01:55:

The Mieses is the Scotch main line with 4...Nf6 5.Nxc6 bxc6 6.e5 etc. - though I'm not sure exactly at what move number the "Mieses" starts.

sharpplay wrote on 06/20/10 at 12:17:22:


Teho (efficiency) means the difference between the players' rating (elo) and their performance rating in that position. Teho(m) is efficiency for black and teho(v) efficiency for white. 

The pieces in "trendi" column are just symbols for the efficiency of the move, e.g. white king means very good results for white and black pawn means slightly better results for black.

The players' elo is 1900-2300, in average 2157, and the games are from years 2000-2003.