Preston Ware Opening

Introduction

When my father taught me how to play chess, the very first move I made against them was the ware opening. I didn't have names for moves I made at the time, nor did I know about castling or en passant. Instead, I focused on moving my castle from the corner. My father began to punish me by moving their pawn forward to take my castle. I would play more games against my father before I stopped playing all together later on and had never won a single game against them.

Later on, I would learn about the minmax algorithm and use it on a game called mastermind to try and copy the move a computer would come up with after the computer processed over six thousand possible combinations of moves and their outcomes. I realized the computer used the same strategy every time and then it hit me. I suddenly realized how to play mastermind to the fullest thanks to a bot without needed the bot anymore and could always win in five moves or less. I tried it with connect four which made me struggle a bit more and then I tried it with chess. Apparently many people already tried it with chess and used more algorithms than merely the basic minmax algorithm. The goal was simple, which was to learn the heuristics of chess from brute force. This has been much more difficult than I had thought and I discovered that I've been arrogant in my approach.

With much more confidence now, I've decided that I'm going to start playing chess my own way even though I know that it's not necessarily the winning strategy, but my goal isn't really to win. My goal is the same as it was in the two previously mentioned games, which is to learn the heuristics and get a sense of mastery internally. In order to do this, I've decided to work on the Preston Ware A4 opening which I first used against my father when I was still very young. I'll now go into a detailed description of how I plan to go about doing that.

Methodology

The first thing is doing an analysis of every possible counter decision black can make against me. The obvious counter move is E5, which makes room for their bishop to attack my castle, something I'll likely not be moving anyway for the strategies I'm concerned with. I used the cloud analysis in order to go 40 deep and would only move 18 moves ahead, leaving a 22 move gap for integrity purposes of the analyzer. Doing this, I managed to see that there's a lot of stalemates in this opening which I'm completely fine with. I classified blacks responses into three categories.

1. Eternal Waltz: This response from black will force a longer game and ensure that pieces aren't exchanged very often if both players are playing at their best. There's only two long games in A4 despite the high chance of a stalemate in most perfect games. C6 and Kgh6.
2. Standard Stratum: These are opening responses which didn't seem to end the game too quickly, but had a nice steady pace to them which felt like other standard popular openings to some degree despite being in the most abundance.
3. Quickfire Sonata: Here, the game seems much shorter and the strategies are very obvious with very little room for deviating without losing even more pieces more quickly. These seem to be the methods anybody would actually use if they wanted to go against this opening believing the player they're playing against isn't skilled. These openings are c5, d6, e5, f6, h5, and Kba6.

This is assuming you play a perfect game and understand with the previous instructions I've given on how to use the analyzer to find the perfect game, though some people have saved analysis games you can likely use. My primary focus now is to master the quickfire sonata and eternal waltz games I've listed above. After that, I'll be studying variations of them from the last move to the first move based on common decisions people would likely make.

Below I will post the puzzles of each of the quickfire sonata games for anybody who wishes to improve at playing only the perfect bot moves if the bot started playing after blacks first move. Enjoy.

Quickfire Sonata

c5

d6

e5 (Most popular response from personal experience)

f6

h5

Kba6