Talk:Chess Opening Theory/1. a4

a4 is a joke of an opening. I understand the desire for this wikibook to be exhaustive but the fact that there are some major lines missing and yet this page exists is ridiculous. Tomson (talk) 00:14, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
 * While I totally agree it's a joke move. There are a few reasons for the page
 * Unusual 1st moves are are required for presentation on Opening_theory_in_chess
 * Same issue in the navigation template.
 * If the page didn't exist someone would create it and if they followed some of the advice written by some other here, they would copy the page that linked to it, i.e the main Opening_theory_in_chess page which is not an easy way to start with a new page.
 * Unusual moves(not just 1.a4) get a lot of traffic, many times what you'd expect, quite strange and can't really find out why. I guess people are just curious. Why for example did you come and look at the page? It does show it's viewed a lot, even if as a chess player it's an irrelevant move.
 * On wikibooks you could image people clicking a4 because it's on the main page and navigation template. But that's not true on wikipedia that doesn't really have a navigation between openings.
 * And guess what, on wikipedia views of 1. a4 are higher they views of the Sicilian Accelerated Dragon. SunCreator (talk) 16:44, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I wound up here, because someone actually did pull it on me, and I couldn't imagine why. I still can't. Mechroneal (talk) 22:22, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Same here - the game didn't last long though... Alan16 (talk) 16:44, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
 * why I play it: at a lower level (around ELO:12-1400), where the shortcomings of this opening aren't as fatal, it's advantage is that it throws people out of book openings, forcing them to rely on their opening skills rather than opening knowledge: if you haven't memorized opening books, it can allow you to beat platers who are 'better' because they have, but haven't developed any actual opening skill. I've played several games that go 1.a4 e5 2.b4 Bxb4 3.Ba3 Bxa3 4.Rxa3 resulting in white being a pawn down and black having no idea how to proceed if he's relying on playing from memorized openings --Arkelweis (talk) 09:56, 7 November 2009 (UTC)