Working on Openings Below 2000 Elo

A few days ago, I posted on the forum a little piece on my recent progress in elo and what advice I had to somebody who started the game and wished to improve. Two people in the comment suggested I could expand on it in a blog format, and I liked the idea, so here we are with my first post on opening for the players below 2000.

In this post, I will first briefly explain why I believe openings are still important for lower-rated players. Second, I will expand on why it is helpful by listing what lower-rated should try to get out of opening knowledge and what they shouldn't do. Finally, I will present a few tricks to learn an opening quickly and efficiently.

All those advice are to take with a grain of salt. They are, of course, just my opinions. I.e., the thoughts of an amateur player who will never become a master but did manage to a reasonably high elo by having fun and being systematic and serious about his chess.

Opening for non-masters is a somewhat controversial topic for two reasons:

1. Openings are so fun, with their cool-sounding names, long history, and opportunities for fun pointless debate that lots of people do waste a lot of time around it.
2. The master standard advice is, in general, to ignore openings entirely until you are at least 2000. I think Kasparov said something of the sort in an interview but couldn't find the source.

As someone who went recently improved but still remembers what it is to play as a 1500- player, I can't fully agree with the idea that openings are useless for beginners. And I am quite convinced that if I lost all memories of my favorite openings tomorrow, I would lose 200 elo point minimum.

However, what is true is that a player below 2300 will benefit from his opening knowledge very differently than masters do.

<2300 players: what you should get out of the openings

1: gaining time. 

If you know the first five moves of your opening, maybe the first 10 in some crucial variation. I don't care if you are 2000+ or 800; it will help you in your game because you will get 1 or 2 minutes on the clock, maybe even 5 if you play 30+.

Suppose you are confident you can play your first five moves without blundering a piece or getting a horrible position. In that case, you will save time and, perhaps more importantly, gain peace of mind. You will stay calm and not lose your nerve early on, which is invaluable.

Granted, this is not as important in OTB chess with 4h+ games, but if you play online, it will make a difference.

2: learning an opening will help you play somewhat similar games.

If you randomly move pieces at the beginning, each game will be completely different from the last. While this "random game approach" may have some advantages to challenge you and force you to see all aspects of chess, my bet is that, on average, it will slow your progress.

Learning chess, especially in the beginning, is all about patterns. Tactical patterns, of course, but also strategical. You have only a limited amount of time to spend on the game, and chess is vast and diverse. If you play each game with a completely different opening, you will most likely see different tactical motif every time and never even notice them.

Play the same opening, and you will see motifs appear again and again, notice them, integrate them and, ultimately, improve.

3: learning openings is learning tactics

Most people will tell you that all you should do before 2000 is working on tactics. This is true, but that doesn't mean you should drill your tactics with the tactic trainer 2h a day. When you watch a video presenting you a line of the french, and they show that you can't play this because it goes into this trap, or can't play that because it will lead into this complexification... you are doing tactics. Better than just random tactics, by the way, because it's tactics you are very likely to see if you play this opening often.

4: learning openings is learning strategy

Basically, all that I said above for tactics can be said of strategy. As long as your a not just learning move without understanding them, learning opening will deepen your understanding of strategy.

5: learn how to punish deviation

I will expand on this later in the post, but the main point of openings for beginners is that slowly, game after game, you will start to accumulate the truly important understanding and knowledge. That is, not what to play in the optimal line. But how to punish people who deviate from it.

<2300 players: what you should NOT get out of the openings

1: Learn a 20-moves-in lines

When masters say you shouldn't work on opening until you reach their level, I suspect that is what they have in mind. At your level, you will never find someone who plays the same perfect line, ever. So it's simply useless. Fun, but useless.

2: learn theoretical draw

When you reach a really high level (master level), it seems that knowing which lines lead to forcing draw is useful. Either to avoid them or to go to them when needed. Again, entirely useless for 99.9% of players since your opponent most likely will deviate way before.

How to study openings

Again full disclosure, I can not give you an ultimate truth here, just my humble opinion, drawn from limited experience. That being said, here are my recommendations step by step:

1: find a book or series of videos on an opening you like. 

I think I may do a post on choosing the right opening for you later on, so I'll assume you already know which opening you want. The question now is where to find material.

If you are comfortable with chess books, your life is easy. There is a lot of fabulous and cheap~ish chess material in libraries all over the world. But I can't help you much on that front because I don't like chess books much. I find them inferior to other learning tools as I am not good at translating chess notations into moves.

If you like videos, you can choose from a variety of chess.com or youtube series and find some excellent tutorials. But if you want to be a bit more serious, I can only recommend ChessBase shop and their "Fritz trainer." Basically, it's a series of videos (between 4 and 20h per opening usually, with a median at 8h, so much more complete than chess.com's series) but presented inside this fritz tool where the moves are shown on an interactive board. That means you can press pause anytime and immediately move the pieces around, fire up an engine and do some analysis. The PNGs are already all created for you, and you can modify them right away without wasting time. In addition, because it's quite longer than chess.com's video series, it's usually more complete and self-sufficient. You burn 30$ once, and you have a comprehensive guide to truly learn, say the king's gambit. Disclaimer, a few of those courses were hard to follow. The chess was always good, but sometimes the teacher is not a gifted pedagogue. If you are interested, I can put a list of recommendations.

2: goes through your learning material while taking notes

Now you have your book, video bookmarked, or Fritz trainer downloaded, just go through it and takes notes. By notes, I mean save a PNG per variation which you believe you will play.

At this stage, you can be a bit overambitious and note variation 20 moves in. Just cut when you believe it will be useless for you. This can be because it's too easy, and you know you'll remember it, or it's too hard, and you know it doesn't concern your level.

3: trim your notes

Now that you have an exhaustive list of variations to learn when you are 2300elo, it's time to be reasonable and decide what you actually need for your level. Save your original file and create a new version with the moves you believe you need to learn. This will most likely include:

5 move deep in all variations you wish to play to at least know the direction. This you will need to know no matter what your level is.
10 to 15 moves-deep lines in critical variations. These include variations where there is a huge tactic to avoid. Unless you are 2000+, don't keep 15 moves-deep variations just because the teacher says it's critical. Critical for masters is not critical for us mortals. Keep deep variations only if not knowing them will guarantee you a crushing loss.
If they highlight important strategic themes, you may want to keep some deep variation (say 20 move-in). I often do this when I want to remember general ideas. I just keep one line (no variation on that line) up to move 20 or even 25, which shows a nice strategic idea and how it can go well, just to be sure I will remember the main idea.

3: Start learning

Here, even if you are only 1200, you can start learning the move. You can simply go over them on a board, but I highly recommend using a tool. I personally like the chesstempo opening-training tool. It will help you drill the move like vocabulary cards. It's a fun activity to do late when you are too tired to play or do tactics but still want to work on chess. You can do it while listening to a podcast or audiobook. And it will very quickly enter your brain. 

4: start playing

Only when you are somewhat sure you can play 5 moves-in correctly start doing some 5-0 games. Have some fun with it but take the time to quickly analyze each game, especially checking that you played the opening move as you wanted.

More importantly, stop your analysis every time your opponent deviates from theory, which leads me to my final point...

5: Kaizen!

Ages ago, I was taught the concept of Kaizen in the context of Toyota's old business models. Basically, unlike Europeans who tended to problems in the supply chain as something to fix as quickly as possible to let production start over, our Japanese friends at Toyota viewed it as an opportunity to learn. Every time there was even the slightest problem in the production process of a car, they stopped everything, worked on it until they fully understood it, and they were sure that the problem would never happen again. Only then could production start again.

Basically, they chose to trade productivity now to gain speed and quality in the future.

I think we can (and should) apply that in the context of opening learning.

Whenever you play a game, blitz or not and your opponents deviate early, try to understand why. Maybe he knows a dangerous line you don't, in which case you need to add it to your to learn it. Perhaps he made a tactical mistake or just a strategic one. In both cases, you should understand it, add it to your "to learn PNGs," and probably add it to your chesstempo learning tool.

If you do this systematically, you will, after a while, have a repertoire containing not only the main move but also common deviations and... more importantly... how to punish them!

That's it for now! I hope this can be useful.

I did follow my own advice, and I feel it helped me well. Over the years, I changed my opening system quite a bit (big mistake, don't do that...) which means that I have saved up thesePNGs for quite a few openings that I don't play anymore. So I'm happy to share them with people if they can be useful. Maybe I'll do this in another post. We'll see.

Until next time, happy learning!