How good is the English Opening?

The English Opening is strange in the sense that you start with c4, but can be very deadly and is fun to use. What do you think of it?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbmb9lNxOh4

Also, have you used it before?

hola a todos

tanl hsdihc

It's hypermodern, it's a flank opening, it's like the 4th most popular move- it's not terrible.

I'd rather play it than play against it. But I'm not very good at chess.

It's fine to do and is seen at top level play.

English is a fine opening. I like using it because it steers away from some of the complicated king and queen pawn openings that have lots of options for Black, and at this stage in my development I don't want to waste time learning openings. There's several nice videos on Youtube that give you the general concepts in play. There's a longer one, almost an hour, from the St. Louis Chess club that gives a pretty good overview. I spent maybe 2 hours total watching the videos on youtube and have been playing if for 3 months now with decent success. Just try to get the basic concepts, don't memorize moves.

I was trying it for a while to avoid theory, but it turns out you might have to learn even more theory than e4 or d4 if you want to play the opening correctly. First you have to learn about 1.. e5 and 1.. c5 and then there are the transpositions to d4 openings. It's used at the top level to avoid the Nimzo-Indian and Grunfeld which is quite nice, but for me it's not worth learning d4 + english stuff just to avoid those two (on-top of the fact that you have to learn the anti-nimzo and anti-grunfeld lines).

A lot of people play c4 and then fianchetto the bishop without much thought, playing it like a london system, but you aren't going to get a good position if you play mindlessly in the opening. You're also missing out on learning about different openings and middlegame positions. I'm not hating on the english, I think it might be the best opening move but it's not for me.

it is poo poo

well google could have told that is pretty good opening. quote from iChess add:
www.ichess.net/blog/english-opening/
"Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, Mikhail Botvinnik and Bobby Fischer – but also it is played by many leading grandmasters today – Levon Aronian, Magnus Carlsen, Fabiano Caruana, Peter Svidler, Hikaru Nakamura, Vassily Ivanchuk and many more."

Good enough for them good enought for rest of us. THen again most opening are.