These openings require good strategic decisions right after the opening moves are played. It is not easy to know what to do next. Bad bishops are in particular hard to deal with.

The Dragon, Accelerated Dragon, Lakser-Pelikan-Sveshnikov and Kan/Paulsen are all strategically easier Sicilians, even if the tactics can get complex. The Caro-Kann, Tarrasch Defense, Nimzoindian/Queen's Indian are straightforward strategically and much easier to play.

The main thing to remember, is that if you aren't a Kasparov or Fischer, what the heck are you doing trying to play their custom repertoires!

As a teacher/trainer, I move my students through a progression of openings. We start with those played by Morphy, and work our way through the historical world champions. Earlier champions favored simpler openings and those are better models for an aspiring chessplayer. I used these models in "World Champion Openings".

<Wish I'd known that earlier, I'm already hooked on Sicilian Schev. & Naj. :-(>

1)If it does work and you win in 4 moves, you haven't learned anything.

2)If it doesn't work, you have your queen where your king's knight should be. This will make development of that knight more difficult, making it take longer to castle also. This is bad if you are trying to learn more about good development.

3)Alternatively, if it doesn't work and your queen isn't on f3, then you spent many moves running her around the board. You will be behind in development, which again will make the game more difficult on you.

And another thing, if I may, I have a 4 year old niece who is very interested in chess. She wants to play with me everyday and move pieces. What I'm doing is when we play I tell her to move this and this and eat this and that throughout the whole game, only playing the Italian where she can develop her pieces. Most of the time I let her win, where she goes around the house and tell everyone, and sometimes I beat her so she can feel some challenge. We do it over and over again (not necessarily the same game). My objective is to train her mind through repitition until she can recognize patterns and moves on her own. It is showing good results. Of course I'm not expecting much at her age but she just loves the game so much that I wanna I take advantage of her interest of it now.

Yesterday, at the third game, I left her to her moves alone without me dictating and she was able to. I exchanged pieces and pawns and she was able to identify which ones can take back. There were also times when she recognized that she can move her knight on a certain square (h5) where it won't be attacked by pawns.