It's an opening for Germany I used to use quite often, but I've stopped since I started playing mostly gunboat. It's only really useful in press games.

The opening is:
F Kiel to Denmark
A Berlin to Prussia
A Munich to Silesia

There's a few diplomatic moves you need to make for this to work.

The first is trying to get French cooperating. However, this is NOT a requirement. Sure, France not moving to Burgundy makes this much more realistic, but it can be done without that move.

Next, you need to convince Italy to move to Piedmont. This puts additional pressure on France to not attack Munich. Again, this move is not required.

The really useful diplomatic move is to tell Russia that: "If you move Moscow to St. Petersburg, I will let you into Sweden and support your wars with England and Austria"

If everything goes according to plan, you have Warsaw, Denmark, have crippled Russia, and have potential allies in England, France, Italy, and Austria (diplomacy wins out here).

Even if you lose Munich, gaining two builds means you can recover.

Do you have an example where this has worked?

http://webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameID=116207

http://webdiplomacy.net/board.php?gameID=115937

One is a gunboat where it happened to work out. There's about a dozen games I played it in, it worked out in about half... the search through games thing doesn't work great so it's hard to find.

Could have predicted both France and England were extremely poor players in a gunboat game where this worked.

Well, to be fair I was an extremely poor player at the time too.

Anyway, I've been trying to develop (or research) some alternative openings for press games and this is one I remembered being pretty successful in the right circumstances.

Another I recently read about (it was posted) is the Koniggratz Freakout:
http://www.diplomacy-archive.com/resources/strategy/articles/koniggratz.htm

I can see this working in press if you can negotiate everything well enough, just like a lot of plays are viable in press with the right negotiating that wouldn't be in gunboat. In gunboat, going the first year as Germany without taking Holland is incredibly dangerous and inviting an easy English/French assault you'll never recover from.

Oh, I agree. I would not risk this opening in Gunboat.

What you want most of all for your 1901 opening is options. As Germany, I like to open Kie-Hol, Ber-Kie and Mun-Ruh. Why? Because it gives you possibilities to work with France (the Sealion), England (if you support Ruh-Bel and give him Denmark), or Russia (You're giving him Sweden). So in fall 1901, you have many cool options, and lots of leverage to start forming alliances.

Your opening does multiple things wrong. First of all, you abandon Russia completely. Second, France has no reason to work with you. You're not going to help him gain English centers, so he'll ask England to give him yours. Finally, England will be happy. But he might not be inclined to work with you, and you're giving him a free move into Holland.

Yes, if Italy attacks France immediately, and England joins you in attacking Russia, you're going to do well. But in those conditions, almost any set of moves will produce great results.

The Koniggratz freakout has the same problem. It doesn't achieve any diplomatic goal, it's mostly just very cute. Against strong players, you'll be facing an E/F or a R/F pretty quickly.

That's a good point. Perhaps a good variant on this would be to have Kiel to Holland, instead of Denmark? Promise England Denmark and Scandinavia for an alliance.

As for alternative openings for Germany, I have occasionally ventured a centrifuge, with not too much success. However, I think that's more because I'm a poor Germany player rather than issues with the opening.