South Africa chess opening fashion

Different chess openings are popular at different times.  For example the King's Gambit was the most popular chess opening for 300 years (wiki) but is hardly ever played in competitions these days.  Below is a very basic openings analysis of the South African chess games played since 2009:

Openings, based on 1 ply			Openings, based on 2 ply
Name	Played	%	Name	Played	%
Reti	32	7
English opening	43	10
Queen's pawn	165	37
			Queen pawn (1. d4 Nf6)	101	61
			Queen's pawn game (1. d4 d5)	56	34
			Dutch	8	5
King's Pawn	208	46
			Scandinavian (centre counter)	5	2
			Alekhine's defence	6	3
			Robatsch	5	2
			Pric defence	6	3
			Caro-Kann	13	6
			Sicilian defence	95	46
			French defence	31	15
			King's pawn game (1.e4 e5)	47	23

The analysis is based on information extracted from games on www.chesstempo.com, that where held in South Africa and the players had ratings between 1600 and 2500, and the games occured since 2009.  Note that the Commonwealth chess games were excluded from this analysis.  450 games were found on chesstempo that fitted these citeria.

The analysis is divided into opening defined by only one ply (a single move) and openings defined by 2 plies.  The percentage for the single ply openings is the number of times this opening was played divided by the total number of games.  The percentange of the openings defined by two plies is the number of times this opening was played divided by the number of times first ply associated with this opening was played (i.e. for the Sicilian opening the percentage is calculated as the number of games in which 1. e4 c5 was played divided by the number of games that had 1. e4.

Due to the small number of games it was difficult to extract further meaningful results, if you would like to examine the data please send me an email and I can supply you with the Excel sheets used.

Of the 450 games the King's Gambit was played twice.