building an opening repertoire around D4

I agree with pfren, I think until you become very advanced there's no need to clutter your mind with thoughts that will just confuse your anyway.

I like to keep it simple and stick with the basics: I play something familiar, develop pieces to useful squares, get the king to safety, and try to play good solid moves each time to gain an advantage.

An anology would be golf, if you are a beginner or average player, trying to study the golf swing of Tiger Woods and do exactly what he is doing is a mistake. Just learn the basics first, build from there.

Somehow I knew someone, probably you, would single out "I am 1700 and I know better" out of context.

I am 1700 and I know better about what it is like to play other people my level right now than you do. When is the last time you played against 1700's in a tournament? Do you sandbag to go beat up on us patzers?

I do not know your 2600 player. But you mentioned he has been playing those openings for 20 years. Likely, he  knows his "funny little openings" quite a bit better than I know my mainline stuff, right?

I am simply telling you how people at class level are playing right now, expecially the young kids. They know their openings. There are two ways this helps them in their ratings - first, by knowing them so well, they get into better middlegames. Second, you learn something about chess as you study openings.

You can deny it again if you like, but its a fact thats what people are doing today. Go watch a tournament with elementary school aged 1700's and 1800's and they are playing openings pretty deeply.

As another point, you mention the 2600 has "excellent positional understanding", and this presumably lets him play offbeat stuff. Well, I suppose I have to point out the obvious here - my positional understanding is nowhere near that player. Deliberately making an early offbeat move is just counting on my opponent not seeing whats wrong with it. Why should I try to play chess like that?

Actually now after I became curious and examines the list of openings this GM Gelashvili guy has played as black I can mention few things. Yes his favourite is Pirc-Robatch Defence with 63 games, but he also has played many less speculative openings:

-Caro Kann, 33 games

-Nimzo-Indian, 24 games

-Few Sicilians as well

I examined few games from each category and he seemed to play them about normally that means theoretically good lines. My conclusion from this quick observation is that he is quite normal GM when it comes to openings. I don't know if he played those strange openings when he was younger or only against clearly weaker opponents than he is. Maybe he plays more strange stuff as white and that is WIkipedia also saying. Like b3 stuff against sicilians, Caro, etc...As black he plays quite good openings because as white there is generally more freedom on opening phase and moves.

crazy

http://www.chess.com/games/view?id=4444124

Thanks for showing this. I disagree that is is crazy. Although I am often a fan of common openings I just think that is beautiful! Nice game indeed. There was at least 2 mistakes.

Not 15...Nc6? but 15...Ra6 is totally even and Instead of 18.Rac1 the 18.Rc5 would have kept the slight advantage

Ok, so was your opponent playing purely on principles after the first couple of moves? I never find that to be the case at my level.

Since my openings are the worst part of my game, I am almost invariably the first out of book. And its a bad move, of course. Winning or drawing for me OTB mostly depends on whether I can fight my way out of an inferior opening. I am trying to change that.

Endgames are the strongest part of my game relative to people my level.

To be clear here, in responding to my post you are saying I need to deliberatley make bad moves in the opening, in order to become a good player.

I assume this is in addition to the bad moves I play anyway because I am typically the first to leave book. Got it. Thanks for the advice.

"Winning or drawing for me OTB mostly depends on whether I can fight my way out of an inferior opening."

You're in good company since Emanuel Lasker and Tigran Petrosian also had to do so even as world champions.  How to Defend in Chess by Crouch is ripe with examples.  It doesn't mean you should continue stinking in the opening however but realize that it isn't the end of the world (usually).  Do you embark on attacks before completing development?  Rarely is someone's issue the opening but rather their positional understanding and calculation. 

You responded to my post where I said "Deliberately making an early offbeat move is just counting on my opponent not seeing whats wrong with it. Why should I try to play chess like that?"

With : 

"Why you should try to play chess like that? Errr, quite simply, because if you don't try to play like that, you will become a good player the day pigs fly."

I am a class player. If I deviate from book early, its not going to be a good move. Anyway, I really dont need help deviating. If I am playing a young player with the same rating that I have, chances are he knows the book moves about 6 or 7 moves deeper than I do.

Ubik, I am genuinely curious about something.

If you took your last 20 losses against players around your level, how many of them were actually lost because your opponent knew the opening better? You said 'nearly all of my recent losses were in the opening' so if you could provide examples (complete games) I'd appreciate that. 

pfren: You provide one solitary data point in your crusade against opening study -- GM Gelashvili.

So what? Even assuming Gelashvili doesn't bother with openings much -- FM NFork disagrees with your characterization -- Gelashvili is only one such player who has taken that approach.

I don't know of any serious players when they were Class B or lower who ignored opening study. They all did well enough and many climbed the ranks to Expert, Master and Grandmaster. Frankly I'd bet that was true for you and yeshman as well.

So, if almost every serious chess player studies openings more than your purist approach would dictate, can it really be that bad a thing?

I can understand the desire to warn against over-study of openings for class players. Sure. But that's not the argument here.

Studying openings is just another kind of studying chess. It's silly to ignore this fact.

Does it matter if you learn about the weakness of doubled pawns or the advantage of the two bishops because you studied the Nimzo-Indian instead of the endgame?

You're absolutely right. When I was younger I spent almost an entire summer just studying the Sicilian Najdorf with its crazy variations like Poisoned Pawn and Goteborg and whatnot although I was 100% aware at the time that I will never encounter those exciting positions at the board. I didn't care that what I was studying was GM-level stuff. I was just curious to see how can White continue its attack and how can Black defend. My mind was full of sacrifices on b5, e6 and checks on h5 and knights on d5 and f5... you get the idea. As a result, my tactical play improved a lot during that time and when I played in the next tournament I was a sharper player.

nebunulpecal: A perfect story. You spent a great deal of time studying a deep opening variation -- to an absurd level by pfren's accounting -- and somehow you improved your chess overall.

Fancy that.

Pontificators like pfren make a big deal about studying chess The Right Way, which happens to be his way.

I'm much more of the Malcolm Gladwell school (see Gladwell's "Outliers" book) that becoming a master of anything involves putting 10,000 hours of serious study into the field. Unless you go about it in a crazy way, you "get good" as Fischer once put it.

It's not so much how you do it as the time you do it and the focus you bring to it.

Well I recently returned to OTB competition after being away for a couple of years. This was my first effort on my return, a draw against a player rated about 300 points higher (he was at his rating floor so probably a little weaker than his rating).

I play a truly horrific opening. I have no idea what to do 7 moves in. By move 22 I am lost. However, I think my opponent was so bewildered by the number of ways he has to win that he picked a complicated one and allowed me back into the game. Draw.

Oh I got the ratings reversed in this game. I am 1690ish and my opponent is 2000. I cant seem to edit it.

X is 2000, Ubik42 is 1697!!

Most of my games on my return have followed a similar pattern, I get in trouble early as black, or as white my opponent grabs the initiative a dozen moves in. My openings have been pathetic. I think if I can just not start so many games giving my opponents huge handicaps in the opening, my results will improve. So it is what I am currently studying the most (except for tactics).

Also, parenthetically, I have a chance to compare myself to lots of strong younger players around here (I coach beginners, so I am connected), and even though their ratings are similar to mine, the sheer amount of opening knowledge they have makes me feel like I just learned how to play. Openings are hard for me.

Endgames, on the other hand, is a stronger area for me. But I am not surviving many games to get there (most of the locals at my club outrate me by 100-600 points. )

thanks for the reply 

No I will not be going out to move 20 or anything like that only enough to get me 1 in good positional play, 2 know what my opponet is doing, 3 become more intuitive. Yes I have work to do in tactics however my biggest problem is time. for instance my 10min chess raiting is horrible because I dont have the time to calculate like I do in online chess and I rush then miss tactics and lose. I need my opening moves to be more intuitive. I understand all the opening principals.

Tactics and endgame are my first priorities but it is good for me to know the basic set up in openings and be consistant with my first moves so as my game progresses I can progress further into the openings

Thanks!  

I find opening theory fascinating, but my poor tactical abilities make it almost worthless.  When you read that "black is better", or "white is better" in a particular opening they are talking about better in grandmaster level play, where the advantage is generally very slight and often positional.

If you study an opening, do so with the idea of understanding the purposes of the moves.  That is profitable, and will serve all aspects of the game.  Don't spend a bunch of time trying to memorize openings, however.  Getting to a known position 9 moves deep in the left handed monkey wrench opening is worthless if you don't know what those moves are setting you up to do, and double worthless if you hang your rook or miss a knight fork despite your "advantage".  

Soltis dealt with this in one of his books. You really have to do both, memorization and understanding. Because while of course memorization is worthless without understanding, the reverse is also true; if you undertsand what to do in a particular middlegame, it doesnt help if you cant actually get there because you cant remember the move sequence.

Good players do, in fact, memorize their openings. I think they just dont like to say it that way because it may feel cheap or something. But they do memorize, and if its good enough for them, who am I to buck the trend?

I agree that strong players do reach a point where they memorize lines.  My point was don't just memorize without understanding.  For a lower level player there are much better returns on your times.  Its far better to know a few lines with an understanding of strategic goals and likely midgame plans (this opening leads to an attack on the doubled pawns, etc) than to try to commit a bunch of "book" to memory without an understanding of what is going on in the game.

Of course it needs to be tailored to your level. You should have a balanced approach.

My main point of arguing is that whatever might have been true years ago about class players at a certain level, is not today. Today the mid level class players, and especially the up and coming generation, do know their openings. I think whats happened is that the skill level needed to get to 1400 or 1600 is now much higher than it used to be.

I have spanned generations, by dipping in and out of chess every few years (I stayed away as long as 10 years at one time). My rating has just always stayed the same. But its gotten tougher and tougher. My personal guess is that a 1500 player today would be about an 1750 player back in the 70's. My 1600 rating in the 70's would probably be in the 1300's today.

So back then, yeah class players didint need opening knowledge as much. But now, you go in without knowing stuff and you will get mauled.

When people get older they often play less and even without it often their rating descreases a bit.

Hard for me to understand for example mathematically the need for 1700 rated player know much theory because on average player on that level does I think 3-5 bad mistakes, blunders per game. Doesn't matter what is the exact number of bad mistakes still he does more than for example 2000. Because of that if he gets great advantage there is still big chance that he will get even or even lost position later on game. If that wouldn't be the case then he actually was not 1700 guy but much better. Mathematically speaking it does not matter so much for 1700 guy is he playing a position that is slight advantage or even. But mentioning something about 2600 level also: on this level slight advantage is much more important to get from opening phase. It happens very often that for example +0,40 position turns into win or draw for white but almost never to loss. This happens on openings like Benoni, Alekhine and others. On that level black seldomly is able to win the games.