DD16 Practical Playability (Organizing my openings Part 4)
Duckfest Digest 16
Practical Playability
Organizing my openings Part 4
Introduction
In previous posts I wrote about my ambition to create an opening repertoire. What started as a simple plan to create a collection of moves to play for common positions, got more and more complicated.
First of all, I learned that there is no such thing as the best move. What is the best move to play depends on a lot of factors. Secondly, even if there were a best move to be found, it takes time to find them. Especially because the strength of a move is for a large part dependent on my knowledge of all future positions that can follow. This meant I needed to keep track of my confidence in my choices.
Then I experienced another layer of complexity:
the difference between my repertoire and what I actually played
Selecting the move I want to play in a given position, even after an in depth examination, doesn’t immediately mean I will automatically play that move the next time I see that same position. Not unless I train myself to play that move. I didn’t do that for most positions for two reasons
- It was never my intention to just memorize openings. I believe understanding openings is more important (I assume this doesn’t need much explanation so I’ll leave it at that).
- It’s nearly impossible. While I tried to remember the important positions and the associated moves at first, the sheer number of positions in my repertoire got out of hand in no time, making it virtually impossible to know them all. Even if I wanted to.
What I played in real games was often different from my repertoire. For many reasons. Sometimes because it’s not obvious what the best move is, sometimes because existing habits or opening principles compel me otherwise. In many cases, I simply play a reasonable move completely unaware that I had found a better move sometime in the past.
Instead of relying on a collection of moves that were best, I needed to include moves I was likely to play as well. This had a massive impact on my repertoire.
About this series
This series does not help other players on what to play. There are plenty of other sources, almost all of them better players than I am, providing content to help you build an opening repertoire, with an emphasis on ‘opening repertoire’. My articles will be on the process of building an opening repertoire, with an emphasis on ‘building it’.
Chapters
Organizing my Openings part 1 - Practical Progress
Organizing my Openings part 2 - Conceptual Considerations
Organizing my Openings part 3 - Repertoire Reliability
Organizing my Openings part 4 - Practical Playability (this article)
Organizing my Openings part 5 - Structural Struggles (postponed)
Practical playability
As I was building my repertoire, I was starting to play better games. My effort to avoid unnecessary early game mistakes soon led to better results. While I was satisfied with my ability to grab this low hanging fruit, to get the fruit that was higher up, I needed to grow.
I could see the fruit hanging high up in the opening tree, but as I reached for it and tried to find a way to get there, I found out it’s not a straight path to get there. I noticed many different paths, branching out exponentially.
In the beginning, when I thought the most important part was finding the best move for any relevant position, my approach was to compare the most promising moves and select the one I liked best. Later, when I started to realize a repertoire is only relevant when I can apply it in games, it dawned on me that it’s just as important to understand the moves I’m not supposed to play. As are the moves my opponent is not supposed to play.
Sample situations
The easiest way to illustrate what I mean is with some examples.
Discovering drawbacks
In this position, the most intuitive move would be to play Bg4. Later, I discovered it might be better to play 5. cxd4. Gotham Chess recommends playing 4. cxd4 first. Stockfish very much agrees, cxd4 is significantly better. The idea is that 5.cxd4 prevents white from playing 6. dxc5. It’s a pretty rare move (at lower and medium rating levels) that I hadn’t seen yet. Once I realized the downside of Bg4 I was convinced 4.cxd4 was the better move.
That didn’t stop me from playing Bg4 again, because it’s such a natural move. To help me stop playing it I needed to include the move, to remind myself not to play it.
Multiple Moves
When multiple moves are playable, it’s more difficult to determine the best move. It becomes a matter of preference.
An argument can be made for Nf3, c4 and Bd3. Besides these three candidate moves, there are several other moves that are also pretty okay. I have many positions that fall into this category.
I chose not to restrict myself too much by just picking one move and forcing myself to play it. The better way seemed to consider them all playable. And register them as such.
Bookmarking Blunders
For my opponent's moves, something similar happened. Instead of focusing all my attention on the most likely move, or the best move, it felt equally important to catalog my opportunities to attack when my opponent doesn’t pay enough attention.
In this position my opponent is most likely to play Be7. A distant second is a6. Both are good moves. In my repertoire I should obviously include these moves.
But the third most popular move is b6. While only played in 15% of games, it’s such a massive blunder that I must include it in my repertoire. One of the reasons I’m building it in the first place is to help me win games. I’m not saying I’m going to dedicate a lot of effort in learning this line, just that I should be aware this move is a blunder, why it is a blunder and how to punish it.
To a lesser extent, he same goes for move #5 Nb4, played only 6% of games. It’s also a blunder and I should know how to punish it. Obviously, it’s not hard to find out how to punish it, but it seems important enough to add and I have missed the best move at least once.
Reducing Risk
Continuing the previous example. There is an 8% chance my opponent will play move #4, which is Ne4. It’s the only move in this position where black has a higher winrate than white.
I’m not saying it’s justified to investigate that move in detail, it probably isn’t as my backlog of positions to analyze is already overflowing. But it’s also difficult to ignore.
After adding the most likely moves for the position and after having identified opportunities to get an advantage, it makes sense to also include the moves that are dangerous. Whatever the underlying reason, other players perform badly against this line. I want to know why. What makes that such a difficult line to play against?
When repertoire meets reality, it becomes a reference guide
Reference guide
To summarize what happened: I decided to log the best moves, the playable alternatives, the moves I shouldn’t play, the moves I could play but preferred not to play, the moves that showed promise that I should check later, the moves my opponents are likely to play, the moves my opponent could play that gave me attacking or tactical opportunities and the moves my opponent could play that could be dangerous, etc.
I put it all in my repertoire.
Eventually I had deviated so much from my initial plan to create a quick easy to play opening repertoire, that it became a reference guide.
This was not what I started out to create, it’s what it became over time. I was okay with this development. Instead of taking a dogmatic approach towards my opening repertoire, I was building a reference guide. I just played games and after each game I checked how well I did compared to my preferred best lines.
Now I’m not sure anymore.
Wrap up
The way this project evolved was not intentional, but it was inevitable this would happen. I stand by my decisions and it served its purpose for a while.
I’m no longer happy with the process so it’s time for something new. Which will be the subject of a future blogpost.
Thanks for reading!
