Sicilian Defense
also known as: 1...c5
1. e4 c5
Named after
Named for Sicily: the 17th-century Sicilian priest and player Pietro Carrera analyzed it, and English writer Jacob Sarratt's 1813 translation of an Italian manuscript fixed the name "the Sicilian" in print.
Origin
Known to Polerio by the 1590s; a minor guest for centuries until the 20th century made it Black's most feared reply to 1.e4.
The story
For 300 years 1...c5 was considered slightly disreputable — it concedes the center's first rank and accepts a cramped game for the promise of counterplay. The hypermoderns rehabilitated it, but it was the post-war generation — Najdorf, Tal, Fischer, then Kasparov — who turned it into the fighting defense: an asymmetric battlefield where Black plays for a win from move one. By the Fischer and Kasparov eras it was scoring better for Black than any other defense, and "Open Sicilian or chicken?" became the eternal taunt at every level of play.
Why it matters
The defining asymmetry of modern chess: Black trades a c-pawn for White's d-pawn, gets a half-open c-file and long-term queenside play, and dares White to attack first. Roughly a quarter of all recorded games begin with it.
Notable games
- Fischer's Najdorfs vs the world
- Karpov–Kasparov, WCh 1985 game 16 (the immortal "octopus knight" Sicilian)
- Tal's sacrificial Sicilians of the 1950s