The Chess Opening Metagame - Pt 1

Everyone who has been playing chess for even a little while learns that there are no quick shortcuts to improve at chess. However, I will teach you a useful idea that comes as close as possible. Most people have never heard of the term "metagame". I had not heard the term either until I began playing the online card game Hearthstone. 

The metagame in Hearthstone is made up of the best and most popular decks. Sometimes, it almost works like rock paper scissors. If you do the research and find out everyone is using rocks, you can play paper and get a huge advantage. Below is a screenshot of when I reached Legend, the highest level in the game (Just so you know I am not making this up!)

Now, time to show how a similar technique can work for chess (which is a much better game than Hearthstone!). 

At each level of chess, there are different openings that are commonly played. At the elite level, the Berlin Defense and Najdorf are extremely popular.

So how to find out what works for your own metagame? Well, if you are like me, you either play online blitz chess or play mostly amateurs in over the board chess. With online chess the easiest way is to go to a database of the games played, filter by your rating level, and choose openings with the highest winning percentages over at least a few hundred games. For over the board chess, it gets a lot trickier, but I will provide some ideas.

Although the Najdorf isn't practical for amateurs, it doesn't stop many of them from playing it like lemmings, maybe because Fischer and Kasparov played it and it seems impressive. But I find winning my games more impressive. In any case, it definitely pays off to prepare something against the Najdorf, since you will face it so many times.

Here's the statistics to back this up:

As you have seen, you can increase your win rate by doing some quick, easy metagame research. In my next post, I will show additional ways to adapt to the metagame and improve your results.