Best chess opening according to Stockfish
Introduction
Stockfish is a free and powerful chess engine. At the time of writing, it is the best chess player in the world. This page presents the best first moves according to Stockfish 16. In order to find the best first move, I let Stockfish running so as to reach a sufficiently large depth. I was aiming for 80, but there was a power cut between 78/79. That shouldn't change the conclusions presented on this page. The following illustration shows the state of the game after the small white castling (6th move). The best opening would be the Giuoco Piano:
Stockfish Commands
To get the sequence below, I executed the following Stockfish commands:
position startpos
setoption name Threads value 70
setoption name Hash value 96000
setoption name MultiPV value 250
go- The first command (
position startpos) places the game in its starting configuration. - The second command (
setoption name Threads value 70) specifies that 70 threads are to be used. - The third command (
setoption name Hash value 96000) allows to use 96GB of RAM. - The
setoption name MultiPV value 250command displays the results of all possible moves from the starting position.
Thanks to the latter, it is possible to draw curves for all possible first moves (e2e4, d2d4, g1f3 ...).
The best opening
Here are Stockfish's top 20 first moves (depth 78/79):
- e2e4
- e7e5
- g1f3
- b8c6
- f1c4
- g8f6
- d2d3
- f8c5
- c2c3
- d7d6
- e1g1
- a7a6
- a2a4
- h7h6
- b1d2
- a6a5
- f1e1
- e8g8
- d2f1
- c8e6
The ideal opening is illustrated in the following video:
The best ones
The reality is a little less Manichean. In fact, if you look closely at the results, you'll see that, depending on the depth at which you stop Stockfish at which you stop Stockfish, the first shot isn't always the same. Sometimes it's e2e4, sometimes d2d4 and sometimes g1f3. The following curve shows the advantage in centipawn (one hundredth of a pawn) of each first move as a function of depth:
If we plot only the 4 best moves, we can see that the first three are correlated with each other. We also discover that the fourth best move (c2c4) is detached from the first three and, above all, that it tends towards 0 as soon as we reach depth 71. This means that this move most probably leads to a draw.
Conclusion
If you've come to this page because you were wondering which is the best first move in chess, then the answer is e2e4, d2d4 or g1f3. If you have to remember just one, then e2e4 is probably the one to play.
