Chess Lessons From a Grandmaster

Openings are crucial in chess. The game is often won and lost in the first 15 or so moves, when a powerful position can be constructed which more or less plays itself thereafter. The openings are very formulaic - you can learn sequences of moves and responses to your opponent's moves. But, and it's a huge but, there are thousands of them.

My Batsford's Modern Chess Openings runs to 700-plus pages. My son laughs when he looks at the densely packed pages of algebraic notation detailing all the lines, with their delightful names: Old Steinitz defence; Sicilian defence, dragon variation (including the accelerated dragon); Caro-Kann defence; the Richter-Rauzer attack; the Slav and Semi-Slav defence (played, presumably, by Semi-Slavs). Where on earth does one begin?

Nigel Short begins by checking out my favoured openings as white. "What's the most common response to e4?" he asks. It's obvious, I say: e5. Bad start: it's c5, the Sicilian Defence, the system with black beloved of both Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov, the two giants of the modern game.

We run through what I play against the Sicilian. By move six, he tells me I am playing an Open Sicilian, the Sozin variation, to be precise: 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 d6 6. Bc4 e6. This is news to me: my Batsford has never been my favoured bedtime reading. Nevertheless, I have played against this line of the Sicilian so many times that, even without knowing what it is, I can cope.

He plays another variant and I play much the same set of moves. It appears that, whichever of the 27 varieties of Sicilian defence is being played, I carry on as normal, putting my knights and bishops on what Short would call plausible-looking squares. Somehow I stumble into a position that isn't wholly embarrassing. "That's not a bad set-up for white," says Short. "So far I'm pleasantly surprised."

He then unleashes the dragon - 1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 g6 - so called, he says, because the theoretical arguments drag on and on (ho-ho, these grandmasters). I emerge from the opening (with the advantageous white pieces) in a clearly inferior position. It wasn't even the accelerated dragon, just a plain old slow-moving one. "That will need something," he says with mild desperation. "The Sicilian is the No 1 headache for e4 players. I tend not to think of the Sicilian as the Sicilian; I think of the Najdorf [pronounced Ni-Dorf], the Sveshnikov, the Taimanov, and each one of those I consider to be one opening. The Sicilian is an ocean."

He sends me away to get Experts v the Sicilian (ed Jacob Aagaard and John Shaw), which is to be my lodestar as I attempt to navigate these treacherous seas.