Best Chess Opening for White

White moves first, which sounds like an advantage and mostly functions as an obligation. You have to do something with it, and every choice here closes doors as well as opening them.

The openings sit on a spectrum of how much you are willing to gamble for that head start. At one end are the Ruy Lopez and the Italian, studied for four hundred years and still not exhausted. In the middle sit the gambits — the King's, the Evans, the Danish — where you hand over a pawn on the theory that time is worth more than material. At the far end are the Fried Liver, the Halloween and the Grob, which range from a genuine trap to a joke that occasionally wins anyway.

You are choosing among thirty-four openings, each shown at its defining position rather than at move one. The question is what you would play every single day rather than what an engine prefers, and those two answers diverge more than most people expect them to. Diagrams are generated from the actual move sequences, so the board you see is the position after the line is really played.