Chess Openings Are Quite Worthless

I know alot about openings. I am ranked about 1700-2200 depending on the site and the type of play and the stage of the moon.

I have to say after years of play that spending all your time studying openings is useless for most people below 2200. (well useless beyond knowing a basic set of openings) Therefore it useless for almost all of us.

I mean nobody follows the lines far anyway at lower levels. Also half a pawn advantage in the middle game is completely useless when compared to a single bad move.

I am just happy to know my openings well enough to get a decent middle game and avoid all the traps. You just need to know enough to survive the opening.

I play boring openings normally and wait for my opponent to lose the game. If he wont then I am quite good at endgames.

I perfer to focus on 1. quality 2. material 3. time. (ie kasparovs advice) and 4.avoiding blunder (my own addition)

Opening study is a waste of time unless you are constantly coming out in inferor positions after the opening. (although I do play to study the french this fall)

Among the myriad of chess players worrying about their openings, there are some who don't pay attention to openings.

Guess who makes it to a higher rating.

opening are not useless. i get sick of playing the same openings and if i decide to plat say the english its good to know its best to fiecetto kingside and castle kingside or double fiencetto. know ing your openings can win you the game. like when and what to trade off to win a pawn so i disagree. by the way my uscf rating is 1974

Chess games at least the ones I play seldom are determined by the openings.

dont get me wrong  openings are a small factor in chess. all im saying is that  weak openings lead  2 weak positions which  can  lead 2 to a losing middle and endgame. even if you avoid traps and losinng material.

I agree with you. But people often put half their efforts into openings to improve. Just seems like overkill if your rated 1400.

ive  tried every  opening under the sun g3 ,c3, nf3, nc3, c4, d4, but you cant lose with e4. as fischer says e4 is best by test

if the point is studying openings is a waste of time true  enough. to improve you should  study things like setting up double  and discover checks sacrificing a pawn 4 a skewer. knight forks bishop forks, how to efficiently adavance your pawns, how 2 force a mate. for example during the 7th chess.com tournament i sacrifices a rook for 3 pass pawns and wonn the game against the  2nd strongest player in my group who has a 2000+ rating, and now im  going 2 the nest round. if  you study you should study my system by aaron nimzowitsch. not how to win in an opening

I don't entirely agree. Yes, below 2200 memorising reams of variations isn't that necessary but I think once past about 1800 FIDE really becoming familiar with the resultant middlegame positions arising from the openings you play can be really worthwhile. I get quite a lot of games like this especially in the Torre Attack where my moves can just come almost automatically if my opponent isn't as familiar as me with the themes: game 

by the way who needs to study openings when you have game explorer

 So you think opening study is all about memorising moves then?

that explore has led me to some horrible positions by me following the statistically "better" moves!  i think you should know the basic ideas behind a variety of openings but memorizing long lines and variations should be left for the serious players not patzers like me :)

I am not good in openings, I play d4 Nf3 and try to get the knights out my neighbourhood, by doing a3 h3  or a6 h6 with black

I had an interesting discussion with a class A player in my area recently.  I had just come out of a tournament where I had terrible results. 

  Prior to that I spent most of my study time on tactics and had been going over annotated master games related to the openings I play.  I was showing him my games and asking him his opinion.  

   Anyhow, he told me that he had gotten to class A with hardly any tactical study at all, which I found hard to believe, but he said that most of his serious study involved developing his opening systems with the aid of a chess engine, database, and opening books along with lots of game play.  He thought that my problem was largely a matter of not being well versed enough in my opening systems of choice.  He does play more positional openings, but again, I was surprised at the nature of his advice, since just the week before I had talked to another strong player who thought any club player looking to improve should just gambit it up. (the usual tactics/tactics advice)

    Anyway, I think that when people talk about wasting time studying openings, it's advice that applies more to the type of player who is constantly switching from one opening to another and neglecting other aspects of the game, and not so much the guy who commits to slowly learning a given system over a longer period of time. 

I'm pretty new to chess and I've looked into studying openings and I was overwhelmed by how many different openings there are. Where do you start?

1.e4

I can safely say that most of my improvement in chess has come from understanding openings better and better, tactical and positional.  I like having an expansive opening background to maximally punish missteps and worse sidelines.  I find that the slight edges you earn there allow for creative midgame play.  Besides, I am arguably the most horrific endgame player in the world, so everything I do well early on transitions into a better chance to win before my pathetic Kingplay becomes relevant.

In the words of Tarrasch, "Before the end game, the gods have placed the middle game."  It goes then that before the middle game, the gods have placed the opening.

First step: Acquaint yourself with the general principles of opening play, then when you look at opening play in games or opening manuals see if you can make sense of it tactically and using the basic opening principles.

Openings are not useless! There comes to a point when not knowing certain moves in certain well known positions like the slav, sicilian, KID, etc. when you can lose or get a very inferior position for not knowing a certain move. That 2200 mark, absolute exaggeration. Openings are not the most important part of the game, and they should not be overstudied instead of learning tactics, strategy, and endgames, but still it's one of the 4 major parts of the game along with those, just the least important major part. Opening study does a few things for you: 1. you will know what moves you are supposed to make quickly in positions you are likely to face (yeah, sure you heard this one before, but this is just one thing) . This allows you to punish someone's errors without much effort. 2. By knowing the typical plans, your moves in positions you know will be much more clear while if your opponent doesn't know what he's doing he can be in positional and/or tactical trouble. This understanding indirectly increases your knowledge of chess quite significantly actually.

People think that openings are just pure memorization sometimes but really it is connected to the other parts of the game. Understanding the plans in openings helps your game in general for plans in the future. Knowing opening traps can improve your tactical awareness. And in the ruy lopez exchange, directly from the opening moves you can learn something about the endgame. I think that if you can master the closed ruy lopez, one of the most complex strategic openings, you will be strong at most other closed positions because the ruy lopez embraces very deep strategic ideas since white can play on multiple wings, he wants to keep the tension in the center, and he makes useful maneouvers, especially the Nb1-d2-f1-g3 one which can sometimes be used in other openings. I remember one game where I used my knowledge of the ruy lopez exchange variation to get into a good position. I played a weird opening, and my opponent played symetrically, with fianchettos on both sides but of course I had the first move.

I made use of that first move by eventually using a tactic that would ultimately force my opponent to get the doubled c pawns and give me a kingside majority. I knew I had to stand better because he didn't even get the bishop pair as compensation. Searching for master games based on openings helps you find certain themes. If you want to see dynamic play, look at/study lines of the Benoni, KID, sicilian, and so on. Good master games of subtle play can be found in many QGD lines, like the exchange variation. So by no means should anything about the opening be ignored at all. You can learn alot from it and believe me KID games can be won or lost sometimes in many different variations based on who happened to memorize more moves unfortunately. Another way to use the opening to your advantage is to study openings and figure why did they play that move? Usually there are deep reasons. When I got a book on the KID, I loved the detailed explanations on why a certain move was made, and when you're just looking at moves you feel alone. But sometimes you just have to do it. So there is definitley a spot where you should study your openings DEFINITLEY before 2200 level!!! More like 1600, and as your rating goes up, increase the memorization but sometimes it's necessary. And do you really think only masters can make use of middlegame half pawn advantages? 1600+ players will make plans, and will try to increase their advantage. They won't play like masters, but neither will their opponent if they're the same level.