A Ready Made Opening Repertoire For Black - Based On NCO - Part 1 of 20 - Introduction

How does an Opening Repertoire look? Well, it is the sum total of all the moves you produce “reproducibly” game after game. It can be represented as a series of tables that answer, what do I move if my opponent moves that. These articles present to you an opening repertoire for Black – centered around Scandinavian Defense and Queen’s Gambit Declined: Lasker Variation. Arguably, this repertoire is the smallest that one can theoretically have. It is targeted at all people interested in getting a Black Repertoire – especially those that are already employing Scandinavian Defense.

1 e4 occurs more than 50% of the time. You will be Black 50% of the time. If you are a Scandinavian player, you spend 25% of your chess life playing Scandinavian Defense while White plays Scandinavian less than 2.5% of his chess life! You will probably have a good understanding of positions that arise in your favorite flavor of Scandinavian.

The first three moves of Icelandic Gambit (a subvariation of Scandinavian Defense) are d5, Nf6 and e6. These three moves can also be played when White plays 1.d4 and 2.c4 - resulting in Queen's Gambit Declined! We will adopt Lasker's defense in QGD, a favorite of Kasparov and Kramnik.

Together, we will be exploring the "best" moves for Black against all possible responses by White. We have seeded our experiment with two openings that we would like to play. We will simply look up Nunn's Chess Openings in those cases where White makes a move that forces us to get out of Book. At the end of this exercise, we should have a clear idea of what really is involved in a complete chess opening repertoire. And mind you, it is just half the story - we are doing this exercise for Black.

In other words, these articles are essentially an exercise in reformatting the bits and pieces from Nunn’s Chess Opening encyclopedia that pertain to the opening repertoire being recommended. (Important moves have been transported to tables – they were originally hiding in footnotes in NCO.) The analyses do not constitute original piece of work. Feel free to copy.