When to Ignore Opening Principles - Calculation Part I

Inaccuracies, mistakes, and blunders are going to be a part of your chess journey. There's no way around it.

After the first two moves there are 72,084 possible positions. After three moves, over 9 million positions. After only four moves apiece, there are over 288 billion different possible positions!

How can you expect to memorize and understand every single possible option? How do better players do it?

The simple answer is they don't!

For starters, a good number of these positions are never reached by serious players in the first place because they lead to losing or suboptimal positions.

So the real question becomes how do you find optimal moves in any position?

Because this is going to be such a complex topic, this will be the first in a series of 1-2 minute reads that will come out daily to help you better understand the process of calculation.

There are many well known openings that are studied and that you can memorize to ensure you're making the best moves (I'll list some suggestions in the comments below).

The reason that, at least for play before expert level, you don't need to memorize 25-30 moves with every variation is because you're not playing someone who has done that themselves.

What you need is a set of rules that help you assess which moves you should focus on and a hierarchy of which rules are most important at a given moment.

In the opening, there are really only three major things you need to focus on.

1) King safety

2) Capitalizing on your opponents' mistakes

3) Following opening principles

Why are opening principles the least important part of opening?

Don't get me wrong, opening principles are very important and you need to take them into account.

However, every move you make needs to keep the safety of not only your king, but your opponent's king in mind above all else.

If the king is exposed, he can fall victim to checkmate or a series of attacks where the other player gains initiative.

Here are two quick examples:

You'll notice that in both instances, the person winning went against general opening principles:

1) Don't bring your queen out early.

2) Don't move the same piece twice until you've moved each piece once and your rooks are connected.

So why did they do this? Because their opponents broke the most important rule. Their opponent left their king vulnerable so the player decided to follow the second most important rule and capitalized on their opponents mistakes.

With a little practice you can do this too. Once we develop a hierarchy for rules and we notice that our opponents have played in a way we wouldn't, our spider senses should start tingling.

Either they've made a mistake or we've missed something.

Either way we need to pause, evaluate the position, and formulate a new plan.

In the next part of the series, we discuss the 5 Opening Principles You Need to Know.

If you'd rather improve your odds in the middle game, you can skip ahead to learn about the 10 Things You Need to Do After the Opening.

Until next time, keep improving, keep learning and enjoy every moment!