Playing Chess vs Playing Systems
I recently played in the 2023 Southern Open tournament. In round 4 I played Liam Oates, who was unrated when we played but finished with a provisional 1100+ elo. The image above is a screen grab at around move 15 in our game. I was absolutely awful in this one (as well as my other games as black in this event). As I started looking over the game I realized that I wasn't playing chess -- I was playing a system.
This position is miserable for me. I can't do anything about this e6 pawn that basically teleported into my space. Further, Liam's bishops are beautiful, and every move I make seems to make it easier for them to attack my King.
You may notice that I am reviewing it from Liam's pov -- a trick I picked up recently when doing a post-game analysis. I do one pass as me, and the next pass as my opponent. In this way, I see the ideas from their side, too. I thought he played well, which he did -- but mostly I just played poorly. It's hard to screw up a cheese sandwich, and that's more or less what Liam was making given the terrible play I offered him.
I went over this game with my buddy Perry in the Skittles room once Liam and I were all done.
Perry is around 1500 strength, and he plays the KID quite a bit. He was able to show me where I went wrong (which funny enough has become easier for me to see as I have gone over the game). I understand the move order, but not the reasoning behind it. I am realizing that I need to really study the KID if I am going to play it -- and if after studying it I find the concepts too complicated -- I need to stick pawns in the center and do my best.
It can be very easy to get caught up on sexy opening titles. The whole reason I wanted to play the Sicilian was because it had "Dragon" in it. The very first opening I learned as White was something called, "The White Sniper" -- it's basically a reverse colors Sicilian Dragon. Funny enough, I lost games down the h-file either way, lol.
I have purchased countless courses on Chessable, or books from Amazon, all with the idea that if I can find that "silver bullet" opening, then I can be unstoppable. Nothing wrong with courses and books -- not suggesting that you stop getting them. In my opinion, the best chess book I own is the one in my cart on Amazon, lol. The best Chessable course is the next one I buy that causes me to not finish the other 80 I started, lol. Get your books. Get your courses, but also realize that if you're getting them as the answer to how to solve chess, you might be disappointed.
Chess has been around damn near as long as the Bible. If there was a bulletproof opening, somebody would have already found it.
To that end, I am simplifying things. I am still going to study openings, but I am going to focus on fighting for the center above all else. I need to build my tactics and middlegame strategy -- beyond the rote task of move memorization. As I said, Liam didn't do anything special in our game, he simply knew why he was doing what he was doing, where I was playing a move order until that move order got disrupted.
Note to Self: Play chess, not systems.
