French Defence Friday

The French Defence??? - sounds like a major battle that Napoleon Bonaparte might have fought 200 odd years ago...  Who was Napoleon? - well he was a French leader who wanted to rule the world!!!  https://kids.britannica.com/kids/article/Napoleon/353514

That's all really good stuff - lots of battles and fighting - but we are interested in The French Defence in a Chess sense.  This is an opening that leads to semi-open games - that is games where there are opportunities to attack, but where the players also establish reasonably strong bases.  Both players are starting by trying to take control of the centre of the board, which is always a good idea.

Why play the French Defence? - why play any particular opening?
Chess is a tough game - the options for playing different moves are almost limitless.  But, over the years, chess players have worked out some good moves at the start of the game.  So, if you know your openings, you can get yourself into a good position at the start of the game.  Whatever your standard, it is always better to start the game well than make mistakes - so it is worth learning openings.  What are the best openings to learn?  As mentioned in an article a couple of weeks ago - probably The Italian Game, or Queen's Gambit.  The following links will let you watch videos of these openings (assuming you have a login on ChessKid.

The Italian Game: https://www.chesskid.com/videos/the-italian-game2
Queen's Gambit: https://www.chesskid.com/videos/what-is-the-queens-gambit

The French Defence
Once you know a bit about the above openings, maybe learn a little about The French Defence.  Most players playing as White are not well-prepared against the French Defence, so, if you do know what you are doing, then you may be able to take advantage of this when you are playing as Black, and perhaps do better when playing as white and your opponent tries it against you.

The game starts with the following moves:
1: e4, e6;
2: d4, d5

​And, this puts you in the following position:

There are then a number of options on how to take this forward, and it is worth reading up on these, but we are not going to look at that here because you will find much better information elsewhere on the internet.  Why not try the following links?

https://simplifychess.com/french-defense/
https://www.chess.com/video/player/why-simon-loves-the-french-the-classical-variation - this is one of a series of videos on www.chess.com which can teach you about this opening

Enough of that... the Results from tonight's tournament...
This evening the congratulations go to Rowantree and MadWiryTank for securing 1st and 2nd position respectively.  Very well played.  Well played also to AbleLopsidedGiraffe, SillyLimit, ZanyHummingBook, and JamesBlyth who all scored 2/4 - very well played to you all.

If you have a ChessKid login, you can see the full results from tonight's event and all the games at the following link:
https://www.chesskid.com/tournament/french-defence-friday-89729/results