Irregular Openings

Adherents of Irregular Openings are the heretics of the chess world. Sometimes their ideas become incorporated into accepted practice, but more often they become a separate body of more or less disreputable possibilities in a shadow existence of amateur-level aficionados.

Note that irregular openings are played almost exclusively by white. This can be attributed to white essentially handing back most of the advantage of playing first to black, and still getting a reasonable game when black knows what they are doing, or getting a crushing win if black is caught by surprise. Irregular openings were also used early on to get computers "out of the opening book", although transposition recognition algorithms have rendered this largely ineffective today.