At what rating level should you start stuyding openings?

I think Kasparov is right saying that at the beginning level opening's really dont matter since ur going learn first the moves of each piece at the the time u get more interested in playing chess then you will look for some helpful materials( the book ) while pertaining to Kasparov says, anyone under 2400 is a beginner). Do you agree? in my own point of view... perhaps there is no specific question on what category level i mean.... master or grandmaster level ratings under 2400 is still on begginers level for a Master's rating. do i have the point here NOODLEX?  

Noooooo because I'm not a beginner and I'm 1066 in real life!!!!!!!

Anyone rated 2400 is no beginner.

Imo it's stupid to say you need no opening knowlege at sub 2000 rating. It does not take long at all to learn a couple opening branches 5-6 moves deep. You will definately have an advantage everytime you play against people that think "opening knowlege is useless unless youre above 2000".

And people should take GM advice on this with a grain of salt. When a GM is talking about opening knowlege he is talking 20 moves deep knowlege in various openings and lines wich is evidently quite useless at sub 2000 rating. It's useless because people will break off from the main lines after 5-6 moves.

So how about that? Learn opening knowlege depending on your opponent. If they tend to go out of book after 5 moves, you learn 5 moves deep. If 10 then 10. It's quite a logical approach.

 Hi, AtahanT.  I think your logical approach makes great sense.  Clarifying question, please.  When you say "learn 5 moves deep," do you mean "learn the pros and cons of every possible variation 5 moves (i.e., two-ply) deep"?  If so, that seems a daunting task to this 1600-ish-level player.  Comments, please?

 Well you will need to learn each branch 5 moves deep. Like if you open with

1. e4

you will need to learn different branches depending on if black plays

1. ... e6 french defence branch

1. ... g7 modern defence branch

1. ... e5

1. ... d5 center counter defence branch

etc

Ok so that will mean you'll end up learning something like 50 moves right? Yeah but don't let that scare you, many moves are so logical that you barely need to memorize them to play them correctly. An example

1. e4 e6

2. d4 you grab the center ofcourse

2. ... d5 He attacks your center

3. e5 french defence advance variation, this is a choice. Easy to remember once you've chosen one of the alternatives.

3. ... c5 He attack your pawn

4. c3 you defend it

4. ... Nc6 he attacks it again

5. Nf3 you defend it again and look 5 moves already. Not hard.

You should learn openings as you progress your play like all other aspects. You can't just sit down and learn everything there is to know about rook endgames and play a real game and expect to just dominate any endgame without practice. You have to learn a little bit and practice a little bit until you have a full understanding about how these things play out over the board at your level.

There is nothing wrong with memorizing a few openings to get yourself to a playable middlegame where you're comfortable and you have some concept about the main ideas for both sides. If you come across an opening that you've never seen before, by all means, look it up. See if you can't figure out what's going on in the game and try to do some of your own analysis, which is good practice for evaluating new openings over the board.

The problem comes along when lower rated players memorize line after line of variations and don't study anything else. At lower ratings, as many other people have pointed out, by move 5, players are already out of the book. So, what do you do then? You spent all that time memorizing all these lines and you don't get to play a single one of them. Instead you miss some tactics and lose material or you lose a drawn endgame because you don't know any endgame theory either.

The point being, study your openings like you study anything else. Don't just overload on one thing, and forget about the rest. Learn tactics, middlegame theory and endgame theory along with your opening theory little by little with plenty of practice and try to apply all these things to your game cohesively, and you'll find your play and your rating increase their level just fine.

I think the bottom line is that once you understand chess a decent amount starting say 1400 (here it won't be too deep) it makes sense to study openings, just not too much. I think people (since SO many chess players always say "don't memorize till 2000!" which is a very high rating and exagerrating) have done that because there are always those 1500 people that study a sicilian najdorf over 20 moves deep and then a stronger player says " get rid of that book and never memorize again unless you become really good!" because making strict rules would convince them to stop studying that admitedley insanely deep line since in fact that isn't good for your chess. But don't ignore them either! Learn your most important sharp lines 10 moves deep or so and just study it like you would tactics and strategy and if you are weak in tactics or strategy then make that the priority but opening needs its fair share of study too.

I think that if you:

- Try to keep a reasonably fixed repertoire,

- Study your own games afterwards (at least look up what the theory was supposed to be after your game),

- Play through some master games in your openings now and then

Then you'll have a pretty decent amount of opening knowledge by the time you're 2000, without ever having started to memorize anything.

As soon you want to play chess seriously, you should start studying openings.

 When I reached the level of a 2000-rating (Fide and Dutch rating) I didn't know anything at all about openings. Often after only a move or 4/5 I didn't know the opening any longer, but because I understood (and understand) quite a bit about chess (strategy, tactics, Positional play) I was able to compensate my bad knowlegde of the opening. I personally think that you shouldn't learn a single move you do not understand of one which you wouldn't have played if you had to think behind the board.

My next goalll will be 2200 and I don't like to reach that, because of the fact that I know all openings until move twenty, but because I can really play chess instead playing "blind" what grandmasters had played before. If you learn the moves you don't learn the game of chess, you learn moves.

So I think that opening study doesn't increase your understanding of the game. So you should only do this when you really understand the moves, all the ideas, all plans and so on... I'm afraid that this might be only at the level of a 2400-chessplayer, if it isn't higher... 

Don't agree with this.

I started with chess by studying openings and why every piece is being moved to some square. It increases the understanding of chess at high speed (I think).

In my humble opinion, the opening is the most important part of your game, and necessary to be known at any level (at least one opening...).

I think it really depends on what we call "studying openings". I bet when Kasparov says you don't need to "study openings" until master, he is talking about systematic study, as professional players do.

One of my old teachers, an IM and ex-Norway champion, explained to me that it was a good idea to start this systematic study when you're 2000, if only because the process is so long...

Systematic study, simply means you follow the tree of analysis of all you major opening choices until you reach a definite conlusion (=, +=, counterplay...), and go through master games in the opening to see how to play the middlegame from your tree position, and to have an idea of typical endgames. You also memorize the lines along the way. No need to say, it's a gruelling work !

But if by "studying openings" we mean have an idea of the basic plans in the opening, see how they unfold in the early middlegame, go through a bunch of master games to learn typical tricks and where the pieces belong, and then memorize a couple of lines (main lines + variations with tactical contents), then I'm pretty sure this kind of work is useful whatever your level, provided someone (friend, teacher, book), can give you the necessary guidance till your analytical powers and strategic understanding is good enough to do it by yourself.

The difference, is that if you do systematic study of an opening (let's say the Dragon as Black), I think you need to learn about 30-40 lines and go through 300-400 master games, while an 'amateur' discovery of the Dragon might settle with ten times less...

What we want to avoid is 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d3 - hey what do I do now ? I can't take his pawn on d4 ? ok, I'll just parrot the opening moves I know, and we'll see...

But knowing the general plans of the king's Indian for the first 10 moves in the classical variation would just be a beginning. The most important part (the ideas once you get to moves 15-20) would be unknown. I knew before that in the King's Indian, you do a kingside attack if white closes the center, but the way I would have built up the attack is much different from the actual theory (in a book I bought on the king's indian now). I used to advance my g pawn to g4, and plan to eventually open the g file with ...gxf3. But most of the time it's much better to just sac the pawn with ...g3. However, in most queen's gambit lines or even more so systems like the london and colle, you could get away with knowing 4-7 moves most of the time.

I agree

Except the sicilian player could be, say, rated 1500 for black (against e4 c5) and 1300 for white, etc. Averaging to 1400