Was Bobby Fischer wrong?

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  • Was Bobby Fischer wrong?

    In the annotations to his analytical notes to his game against GM Arthur Bisguier New York State Championship 1963, Fischer writes in his famous book My 60 Memorable games that "1.e4 was Best by test" . However he may have been wrong. On the site Chess24 they give a 3 million game database. Nowadays chess databases are approaching 6 million games so I assume that the 3 million represents games with only at least 1 GM participating. The site gives statistics where the % of wins are the same for both 1.e4 and 1.d4 at 37%. However 1.d4 has 36% draws and only 27% losses whereas 1.e4 has 33% draws and 30% losses. In my 2004 chesstree based on 1 million game fragments it gives 1.e4 with 53.8% whereas 1.d4 is 55.5% which result roughly corresponds to the above stats of the Chess24 database. Based on the large sample size these results are statistically significant. Many other large databases give similar results. I know that 1.d4 is a lot more boring than 1.e4 but in the long run you should obtain better results with 1.d4. So maybe Bobby meant "Best for an exciting game."

    Alan Tomalty

  • #2
    Re: Was Bobby Fischer wrong?

    This is so dumb I don't even know where to begin. Sorry.

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    • #3
      Re: Was Bobby Fischer wrong?

      Originally posted by Mathieu Cloutier View Post
      This is so dumb I don't even know where to begin. Sorry.
      Says it all.

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      • #4
        Re: Was Bobby Fischer wrong?

        I think 1. d4 is scoring better these days, but in old days e4 scored better.

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