Attacking in the Hyper-Accelerated Sicilian

The Sicilian is one of my favourite openings for sure, I love the unclear positions that arise, often with both sides trying desperately to press through their attacks on different sides of the board! At the moment I'm trying out a variation called the Hyper-Accelerated Dragon, which is quite an interesting one. The main difference to the other Dragonn variations is that Black attempts to gain time by playing d5 in one go, thereby giving White less time to prepare for a kingside attack before the centre or the queenside comes under fire. Many White players choose anyway to castle queenside and play for the kingside attack, and these games become very tense and exciting! I think I've been scoring quite well in this sort of game though - I definitely feel Black gets the edge with the little extra time he gains!

Here's a 10 minute blitz game I just played and quite enjoyed, which I feel illustrates the above scenario quite well. My attack comes quicker and, although I think I did waste a few moves defending my king which weren't strictly necessary, I still get the time to finish off. In the regular Dragon maybe I wouldn't be so lucky!

So I learnt a lot looking over this game. In the game I realised that e6 was a time wasting move straight after moving, but didn't notice until afterwards the other moves eg. Rb6 would have been much quicker than Rb7, etc. In fact I was shocked at how much time I wasted! Luckily, the Hyper-Accelerated set-up saved me time in the opening, and so I was still quicker. What a good variation!