We have discussed you often don't find the optimal way to punish an opponent's weak move in the opening. Thinking "too schematically", i.e. hesitance to alter your usual scheme of development may be at least partly to blame.

In all such situations where your opponent plays a funny-looking move in the opening, I think you have to ask yourself these two questions:

1) What is his move trying to accomplish, which is different from what the "main line" attempts to accomplish? Occasionally you will find funny-looking moves that are just plain stupid, but most will at least contain a decent idea.

2) What is the flaw with it? All lines that aren't main lines probably DO have a flaw, otherwise they would be main lines!

3) How can I best punish the flaw? Punishing the flaw implies that you will also not allow the decent idea, assuming there is one, to succeed.

I'm going to make up a "Quiz" of opening positions, where you are faced with a weird-looking move, and your job is to use the thought-process above to find the best continuation. I'm not holding my breath waiting for you to get these exact positions in tournament games, as it's virtually impossible to predict what weird things your low-rated opponents will do. Rather, these are just designed to give you practice in finding the best way to refute bad moves.

Some of these actually came from real games, others I just made up. They vary in their degree of awfulness: Some are just sidelines of regular openings, others are really awful or downright losing. In some cases, the regular "thematic" continuation may be best. In others, the best continuation is something different from your normal scheme. So you will be forced to think!

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