TacticBarTL;DR: The Sicilian is attached to 189,118 opening-tagged puzzles, more than twice the French Defence. But only one puzzle in five has an opening tag, and this does not tell us the tactical rate of either opening.
The ten most common opening families
The missing denominator
My first temptation was to call the Sicilian the most tactical opening. Unfortunately, that is not what this table measures.
The Sicilian may simply be first because people play it more often. To calculate a tactical rate, I would need the total number of games played in each opening as the denominator, not just puzzles that survived Lichess's selection process.
Only one puzzle in five has an opening tag
Of 6,100,952 puzzles, 1,214,759 have at least one opening tag. That is 19.91%. The field is blank for the other 80.09%; the export itself does not say why, so I have not tried to assign those positions to an opening.
The leading named variation
The Italian Game: Two Knights Defence is the most common specific variation, with 17,986 puzzles. The Accelerated London System follows with 16,489. Several “Other variations” buckets are larger, but they are classifications rather than useful repertoire choices.
Would I change openings because of this?
No. If you wanted to build a Sicilian-specific puzzle set, there is at least plenty of material to work with. But raw counts are a poor reason to change repertoire. A more useful next analysis would divide puzzle counts by the number of games in each opening, then control for player rating.
Method
I analysed the OpeningTags field in the official Lichess puzzle export dated 10 September 2026. The first tag is the opening family; later tags identify a variation. Percentages use the 1,214,759 tagged puzzles as their denominator unless stated otherwise.
The complete ranked opening and variation lists are in the derived JSON.