building an opening repertoire around D4

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.

Quite the opposite applies. Haven't you ever heard about ratings inflation, caused (mainly, but not solely) by the broadening of the rated players' pool?

I have also stayed away from playing for a good nine years or so. I would expect my rating declining some 100 points, or maybe more than that, yet factly, I have no big trouble keeping my rating in the 2350-2400 range.

Quite the opposite applies. Haven't you ever heard about ratings inflation, caused (mainly, but not solely) by the broadening of the rated players' pool?

pfren: I have also heard of rating deflation within the USCF pool. (See http://www.glicko.net/ratings/cl-article.pdf) The one expert and three masters I knew from my high school and college teams all lost 100-200 rating points from 1995-2002. Mark Glickman, who now chairs the USCF ratings committee, put in fixes to adjust the rating system back upward. I hope it worked.

I notice that for all your vaunted FIDE ratings, you can't manage more than 1831 here for Live Chess on chess.com. I suspect that says more about chess.com deflation than your ability, but I still find it curious.

Nor do you respond to any of the counterpoints I have brought up.

I'd agree that it doesn't matter as much for class players to study openings as masters, but it still matters. If someone wants to take your Capablanca purist approach, that's fine with me.

Nonetheless, I hold to my point that studying the openings as a class player isn't a waste of time and doesn't hold you back. You are still studying chess. The principles, with some minor differences, which apply in the opening, apply in the middlegame and apply in the endgame.

Tactics, strategy, pawn structure, piece play. You find those aspects in the opening too. And if you save fifteen minutes on the clock and feel more confident as you play a rated game, all the better I say.

If you are studying openings, you are studying chess, and you are getting better at the game.

Maybe that doesn't fit your vision of how class players should learn the game, but if it works, it works. It's up to you to demonstrate that it hinders.

Tell me how your theory would apply to Bobby Fischer. Tell me how Bobby Fischer's study of openings before he was a master held him back.

Here's a wonderful link to a pdf for Ken Smith's Chess Improvement Course.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/101691514/Kenneth%20Smith%27s%20Improvement%20Course.pdf

Ken Smith, deceased, was a remarkable American master who influenced thousands of chess players and was an icon on the American tournament circuit with his trademark top hat. He was passionate about playing chess and educating players coming up. He started an influential chess publishing company providing a start to writers such as Andrew Soltis. Smith coauthored books with Larry Evans. Smith was employed as an assistant by Bobby Fischer in Fischer's epic quest for the World Championship in 1972. Smith also became one of the top poker players in the world.

pfren has seen fit to disparage Smith repeatedly in this topic. Smith and pfren had about the same accomplishment in terms of FIDE ratings -- though I wonder if Smith would have done better had he lived in Europe instead of Texas and had more access to FIDE tournaments.

People will remember Ken Smith and for good reasons IMO. When pfren dies, he will be forgotten almost immediately as a minor European master.

Read the link and see who you find more persuasive -- Ken Smith or pfren.

Did you know that Ken was also a poker player and whenever he won a big pot he would stand up and yell 'What a player!'

Personally I studied opening for like 2 years as a 1300 player (not very much but i did get through a book or two in the starting out series). My rating would not change. I just did that and tactical puzzles when I had the time and played lots of games. Then I read The Amateur's Mind by Jeremy Silman and my rating went to 1650 in less than a year. Then I spent lots of time learning tactical puzzles to keep up with my good friend in tactics, learned Silman's Complete Endgame manual and how to attack with pawns in the Kings Indian Defense. In the next year my rating went to 1816. Then finally once I had tactical and positional strengths I learned lots about pawn structures and middlegame planning, and then once I studied that I finally moved on to openings and going over GM games involving my openings. I read through 1 book on pawn structure and 3 books on openings. I also watched all of GM Khachiyans videos here on chess.com to further develop my positional, tactical, and planning skills. After that my rating went up to about 2050 after 3 tournaments, and it's funny because even then 3-4 mainline openings I play as white, I invented my responses to black over the board. Turns out they are well known sidelines that promise comfortable equality, but I didnt need to study openings to find something decent to play.

So based on my experiences I agree with pfren. Dont fall into the studying openings before you learn how to walk trap. Learn positional play and tactics VERY WELL, and then learn pawn structure plans. Once you have these tools you are prepared to understand the opening and benefit from learning them as well as GM games. This means you will be class A before you really want to sink time into openings. Otherwise you wont get many noticable advantages from it, since you wont be able to punish them from deviating from the main lines.

I don't know much about Ken Smith, but if I had a chess book publishing company, I'd try to convince beginners that the best way to improve is to study openings -- and that the best way to study openings was buying dozens of my books as well.

I read through the PDF hoping to find something enlightening, but it's basically just an advertisement for his books.

pfren, on the other hand, posts actual useful advice without having a vested interest in getting you to buy books.  While his posts come with a little bit of attitude sometimes, I certainly find his position more persuasive than a guy who is telling me I need several books, and being courteous enough as to list his catalog number with them.

Very well said, kponds, I have nothing to add to your post.

Yes, interesting article.

"

Because so many people were on their rating floor, the EB at that time agreed to

create a 200-point floor. This is where it stands now. Coupled with the drop in the

rating floor was an increased influx of scholastic players into the USCF, who were

improving more quickly than the rating system could track them. Both of these

factors, in combination, resulted in what seemed to be rating deflation, where

players who were otherwise at stable strength were consistently losing to young

underrated players. The EB claimed that the USCF was rapidly losing members

who were frustrated by unfair rating decreases, and wanted the Ratings Committee

to address this problem. In response, the Ratings Committee developed a

substantially revised rating system. The details of the system had been worked out

by 1997, but USCF office difficulties prevented its implementation until early 2001

"

Though this is a different point than what I was talking about.

Phelon said he studied only openings and tactics, at 1300, which certainly sounds like a bad plan. I think whats best is probably always a balanced approach, which I never did either. Openings were always a phase I ignored. But its something I am trying hardcore to fix in my latest incarnation. We'll see.

But again, my observations about improving players in general (not me, I am probably too old to improve much now but I am trying again) comes from watching today's young scholastics, who I have lots of chances to observe. They are getting trained by coaches, they have huge leaps in their ratings, and boy do they know their openings backward and forward.

Their results do not lie.

I agree, and ya with me it was some tactics, but mostly opening heavy study.

And the reason they are improving is because they have a coach to explain the pawn structure plans and piece set up of the various openings they play to them, and then whenever they play a game their coach can critique their play and show them ways to correct their positional/tactical mistake. Not to mention I'm sure the coach gives them tactical puzzles, or a tactical workout all the time, as well as teaching them GM games to explain positional, pawn structure, and tactical ideas.

Basically they are being flooded with chess information, motivated to improve, and their basic chess framework: tactics, positional play, pawn structure plans, and endgames, are being built up heavily, as well as their specialized chess knowledge: openings. You are just noticing the openings :), but honestly knowing openings isn't effective without the base knowledge.

Just like if a boxer hasn't even tried strength training or conditioning it doesn't matter how much specialized knowledge he has of styles and punches, he's going to be demolished. Where as when he is already physically powerful and has good conditioning, his style, execution of various punches and tricks becomes quite important.