English Opening: Mikenas-Carls Variation
White scores
55.5%
Wins more53.2% won4.5% drawn42.3% lost
Every level and clock · 830K games
Win rate by rating
White’s score gets better as the rating rises.
| Rating | Score against even | Score | Won | Games |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 51.1% | 49.6% | 5.1K | ||
| 52.1% | 50.7% | 12K | ||
| 53.5% | 52.0% | 27K | ||
| 53.3% | 51.7% | 57K | ||
| 54.0% | 52.2% | 110K | ||
| 55.2% | 53.1% | 185K | ||
| 55.9% | 53.5% | 223K | ||
| 57.0% | 54.3% | 176K | ||
| 58.4% | 54.7% | 34K |
Every clock · Tap a row to set your level.
What does Black play next?
Black's most played reply is 3…c5, the Mikenas-Carls, Sicilian.
Is the Mikenas-Carls Variation good?
Yes, for White, across every level and clock.
Floor 55.4 is the worst score you would still get, 90% confident.
Where it wins · rating × clock
Faint, hatched: few games, never the best or worst. –: too few to score. Tap a cell to set your level and clock.
Average game length
How do you score in your own openings?
Leaks reads your recent games and lists the openings you score worst in.
More English Opening lines
Most played first; each line counts its own games.
- King's English Variation53.1%1…e59.1M games
- Agincourt Defense52.3%1.c4 e68.6M games
- Anglo-Scandinavian Defense53.8%1…d57.2M games
- King's English Variation, Reversed Sicilian54.1%1…e5 2.Nc35.9M games
- Symmetrical Variation52.8%1…c55.0M games
- Great Snake Variation51.7%1…g64.8M games
Methodology
Across every level and clock, the English Opening: Mikenas-Carls Variation scores 55.5% for White, with a range running from 55.4% to 55.6% around that figure, from 830K rated Lichess games. Win rate, draw rate and loss rate come from games played September 2023 to August 2026.
How the figures are made
- Whose games these are
- 830K rated games played on Lichess (2023-09 to 2026-08). The games are Lichess’s and free for anyone to use. What is ours is the reading of them. Last rebuilt September 2026.
- Which games we count
- Rated games only — nothing casual.
- Both players within 200 rating points of each other. A mismatch tells you about the gap, not about the opening.
- At least 2 moves played.
- A game is filed under White’s rating.
- Why every number comes with a range
- A number off a few hundred games is a guess. The same number off millions is a fact. The range is what tells them apart, and it is what the lists rank on — so an opening cannot reach the top on a lucky run of forty games. The more games behind a figure, the narrower its range.
- What the Floor and Edge at worst are
- The Floor is the worst score you would still get, 90% confident: the low end of a figure’s range, not its average. Edge at worst is how far wins run ahead of losses, 90% confident, so above zero, that side wins more than it loses even on a bad day. Each is stated for the rating and clock shown, over the games that reached the position. They are on different scales: a score sits at 50 when the sides are level, an edge at zero.
- How much we need before we say anything
- An opening page needs 100 games. A figure on it needs 100 games at its rating and clock: short of that the answer reads a wider scope and says so, a table row shows only its count, and a map cell shows a dash. Under 1.0K games a figure is drawn faint, and never leads a list or counts as the best or worst place the line wins. The chaos and trap lists need 500 games overall and 250 games at one rating or clock.