Chess Tip #4: Learn Three Openings, Part 1 - Advanced French

I know... I know... I said no one has to learn openings. And you don't. You can skip opening theory entirely and still be a class b or higher player. But. BUT. If you familiarize yourself with just three openings that feel ok to you; that you'll play over and over and learn the lines of gradually, games will start feeling less chaotic and more instructional. Why? Well, two reasons: 

1. You'll have a goal for your opening: a position. This'll have you focusing less on attacks and trades and more on just developing pieces into a familiar position that leaves you feeling comfortable in the mid game. 

2. Avoiding traps. Every opening has weaknesses and traps. If you play someone who knows them, and knows the opening your playing (cause EVERY opening move sequence has a name and has been studied), they'll know how to punish. E.g., if you play the Ruy-Lopez-style centerpawn -> knight -> bishop combo and you don't know how/when to defend against an a or h-file queen counter, you lose a bishop before move 5. 

So, yeah, spend, like, 10 minutes to familiarize yourself with an opening you like and you'll remove so much of the stress of the early game. 

Or you can just lean into that Big Dick Energy and play Bongcloud. 

I put some suggestions below, but if you're bored, Hikaru and Levy did a Beginners Opening Tier list video (well, three of them) that I enjoyed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9CwH47r6og

Advanced French

There's a lot of great white openings like Caro Kann that are fun to know, but don't really OCCUR much cause, especially at the Class C player level, you're not gonna see too many d6 black openings. But advanced French is HELLA common, and a great start with some great lines. Hiraku has said he pretty much only played Advanced French for white all the way up to 2200, so it's not a trick or novel opening that relies on fooling noobs. You can rely on this opening over and over.

So aside from the fact that it's frequently usable, why Advanced French? Well, right off the bat, you'll notice a few advantages. Both of your bishops now have open attack diagonals. You can choose to attack the queen and maybe pin a bishop or knight for a bit with Ng3 -> Bg5. Or, conversely, the king with Nc3 -> Bb5. 

You're also limiting black's ability to develop their G knight by blocking the common f6 outpost, giving it only the e7 output as a potential landing tile. This makes matters even more difficult for black's F bishop, since d6 and c5 are cut off by white's pawns. Move be7, and you black boxes in their knight. Move b4, and white can bully the bishop (wherein black will typically look to trade). 

White's biggest weakness is the d4 pawn, which black will commonly attack with c5, so you'll want to shore up support with c3 and Nf3. 

More often then not, if you're playing an opponent who knows how to respond to the advanced french, you'll end up with a board that looks like this: