Chapter 2: The London System

I hope you enjoyed reading about the Queen’s Gambit opening in chapter 1. Before I begin talking about the next opening, I want to mention that most openings are specifically for either the white or black player. In the official rules and tradition of chess, white starts the game. For this reason, whoever is playing the white pieces has a slight advantage.

However, the advantage of white doesn’t mean that white wins much more often. However, because the white player can make the first move, they choose which openings black can play. If white does D4, then black would not want to move their king’s pawn two squares forward to E5. White’s pawn would just capture it and black could not really capture back without great effort. For this reason, I tend to prefer D4 openings when playing with white. The Queen’s Gambit, the London System, and the Trompowsky Attack all start with D4 and so you will see me recommend this as the best move for opening the game as white.

With that out of the way, let me introduce you to the London System with one quick image!

Take a look at this image. It is only white’s side of the board. That’s because the London is sort of general purpose and doesn’t depend on a specific move the opponent does. In most cases, you won’t get a chance to complete this entire setup if your enemy attacks you quickly, however, I want you to look at this image and see that almost every piece has another piece defending it. This setup also allows the king to choose which side to castle on depending on your style and what your opponent does.

The best part is that this doesn’t require you to move the pieces in a particular order except that you will need to move your queen’s pawn and dark squared bishop out before building the pawn triangle. The speaking of the pawn triangle or pyramid, this defensive strategy works because of the diagonal capture nature of the pawns. You will want to use a structure like this for your pawns in combination with many openings.

Now here is where what I will tell you is going to be different than a lot of other chess players, the London can also work from the black side like the image below.

 
The chance that you will have a setup like this is rarer when playing black but it’s not impossible. In fact, you will notice that the Scandinavian Defense, the French Defense, and the Caro Kann Defense all can transition into this because the pyramid of pawns can generally work starting with them. You might be missing a few pawns if they are captured, but this is still a really good setup and something to work for even when playing as black.

But there is one final piece of advice I would like to end this chapter with, the opening is only part of the game. Things usually go well for me in the opening but then I blunder somewhere further down the line. Learning an opening system like this doesn’t make you a chess master, but because this is easy to learn and memorize, I hope this post will be helpful to someone out there who is confused because there are so many openings.

In my live chess streams, you will frequently see me use the London because it’s the opening with my highest win rate. Check out this video for a quick overview before I played some actual games with the computer and then a real person.

https://youtu.be/nC0bPC-BlIU?si=8dM8MALHjbi0zF1q