Welcome to the Modernized Bird Opening!

I began studying the Bird in January 2023 and this book marks a summation of 2 years of deep analysis. When I had originally started building the repertoire, I assumed it would take a few
months and be a walk in the park. How naive I was! Bird´s opening turned out to be one of the most complex openings I´ve ever had to analyze in my life. Having spent an enormous time analyzing, and checking over the material I can confidently say I´ve given this my very best. It's taken months of sleepless nights and chaotic days but finally the book is done.

In this day and age it seems that 1.d4 and 1.e4 are running out of steam. A stronger generation of computers is showing that almost every single mainstream opening is approaching 0’s. As this has happened, opening trends have shifted away from playing for any objective advantage to playing to surprise your opponent and catch him in a situation his skillset is ill-equipped to improvise against. The structures arising in this repertoire fit this criteria perfectly – they don´t resemble anything close to king or queen pawn openings. In fact unless your opponent plays the Dutch defense as Black, they will likely never have seen any of these structures, motifs, or positional themes before. Your frequent practice of such positions will amass a wealth of experience and know-how inaccessible to opponents who rarely encounter them. This differential in experience should translate to a higher and higher win rate as it grows. Therefore I would urge readers to not get disappointed with any initial results. Like all openings, you need to ride the learning curve. I have several students who play the Bird. While initially their results are commensurate to other white openings, as they continue to play such structures they gradually achieve win rates of between 70-80%. I have one student, Ean who started playing it as a 1500 last year. Currently, he is 1800 and consistently outplaying 2000’s in the Bird.

Beyond its surprise value, Bird’s Opening has an awful reputation. As we will see throughout this book, this reputation is undeserved with Bird’s Opening offering fantastic fighting chances. However, rather than complain about this reputational travesty, we should embrace it. Your opponents will not take the game seriously until it is far too late. Bird’s Opening is currently in that ‘goldilocks’ zone of the great arbitrages in life. The majority of chess players have dismissed it overlooking its inherent value and this allows for adopters of the Bird to take advantage of this asymmetry. As of this writing, it is played .9% of the time in online databases and this drops to .2% (!) in the master’s database of OTB games. For reference in the OTB database 1.e4 is played 45% of the time. So for every 225 OTB games your opponent plays against 1.e4, he plays against the Bird once. While a case could be made that 1.e4 or 1.d4 are stronger, the objective difference between them and the Bird is infinitesimal. The way I see it, people will continue to ignore the Bird for the foreseeable future. Unless this book sells a million copies, the Bird will never be played remotely close to the frequency it deserves. Because of this it will never be worth your opponent’s while to study it, so it will always carry great surprise value.

The book is structured around the Lichess database for players rated between 1200 and 2000 – so if you are in this category the repertoire will synchronize perfectly with the lines your opponents are choosing in your own games. Whenever possible I have sought out lines to surprise your opponent and give them the toughest time figuring things out. My goal for this repertoire was to cater it to the club player but to also nuance it enough to be played at the highest level. I made Grandmaster in July of 2022. If I were quizzed then on any of the ideas in this book I would have failed miserably! It is very easy to go through one’s entire life playing chess and never seriously studying these structures. I would reckon half of my colleagues (my GM friends) do not know anything about the Bird. I did not want to put my name on something that could not be played at the GM level and towards that end have been playing the Bird exclusively in my games online and in tournament practice. I´ve gotten mixed results, but at the same time I have come to be certain that this is playable at all levels, FOR A WIN. Online, I have won against several grandmasters in the top 100 and even a few in the top 20. I didn’t play any classical chess in 2024, but I did beat two IMs rated around 2400 with it in 2023. I am planning to return to chess this summer and I look forward to demolishing the competition with this great opening. My opponents can feel free to look through this book to see what I’m going to play. It won’t matter much – whatever position occurs in my classical games I will have played tenfold as much as them.

Opening Reference Books

The Modernized Bird's Opening - HARDCOVER

Chess Archives