What is the worst opening?

You aren't understanding.

AZ, that was rude. How dare you!

Lord Phan, first of all, you might have overlooked everything I said. Second, refresh your definition of "opening" please.

I am not looking for two votes. I am looking for the majority. What about the Damiano defense? You could get checkmated there!

it is technically speaking

An opening is a variation of a chess game that doesn't lead to checkmate in itself, but rather the middlegame or the endgame, or a draw there.

An opening trap, on the other hand, DOES lead to checkmate in the opening.

Do you get me?

Which is the worst opening? depends by whatever arbitrary metric you set. What counts as an opening and why for our purposes. Once you have the criteria you can math it out. Say you want the stockfish evaluation to be your metric and book moves count as an opening you take every book move marked by chess.com then take the last move position in all of them dump into engine and look for worst evaluation. Without any objective criteria though its just opinions. So I think it makes more sense to agree on this objective criteria otherwise all discussion will just devolve into Each person citing their own interpretation of what they think counts as an opening. So even withd this sentence lets assume we all agree your statement that "An opening is a variation of a chess game that doesn't lead to checkmate in itself, but rather the middlegame or the endgame, or a draw there."

So I don't think many people would agree with this as a general rule as that's not how most people think about it. How do we then determine it does not lead to checkmate? Stockfish vs Stockfish in Grob is more often a loss than a draw in high level engine play so in that way it does lead to mate. If 1.3 is typically mate does that mean an opening with +3 is obviously to mate? If no and it must be brute forced at what depth can I use table bases like in an ICCF match? If we make it so we have to brute force and we are not sure of the outcome isn't that then circular logic? As in if we don't know the outcome we cant really say its worse without a metric to measure the position. No matter what metric you decide to use the odds of the one defense your fixated on being the worst is pretty much impossible without intentionally setting the metrics in such a way to achieve that goal. From the computes perspective it doesn't matter if you play f5 or f6 there stockfish will still win the .3 more for white with f6 is irrelevant to the outcome. How many moves deep with each choice do we go some book moves fog 11 moves deep. The reverse borg E4 g5 stockfish says is a few centipawns worse than yours and that's only 1 move a player. From the same position Nh6 instead of f6 is also about .10 centipawns worse with the same knight captures line. In fact almost any move that hangs the pawn is about the same the f pawn moving isn't even why its so bad its the fact the e pawn still hangs. Its not much different than ross gambit just gambiting the e pawn on move 1. Heck you could play hanging the queen move 2 and its not forced mate any less than the grob is if your using an engine to prove it. Which is why I think you need a good metric for what your really asking here. I've seen positions with evaluations of -12 that are drawn with horizon effect so without a brute force solution any postion that cant be brute forced into a table base is the same. If we want a human metric the best one is database win rates from real games.

Damiano is not the worst, its only +1.7 ish if black knows not to accept the knight sac and knows theory and plays Qe7. There were actual GMs who specialized in Damiano

Chigorin used to play it against other masters

The grob opening

Fools mate

According to stockfish,it's grob opening,and the second one is barnes opening. Both make you ready for fools mate

fred gambit

1.e4 f5

2.exf5 Kf7??

it's +6 for white if he knows what to do

I am fred and I not bad in my opening

Just because the opening has your name in it does NOT mean that it is your opening.

100 posts! I never though I would see this day. So let's take a vote.

Damiano Defense

Grob Opening

Duras Gambit

Fool's mate is not an opening, so I will not list it.

The vote ends when there have been 7 days without a post or when we get 100 votes. Do not post after your vote. It will mess me up.

My vote? Damiano Defense. Read the conversation to see why.

Ruylopez and queens gambit are the two worst openings as white

Honestly....wut

No. These are actually pretty solid openings, especially compared to openings like even the Englund gambit.

Damaino: Qe7 exists.