In my opinion, the best opening for a beginner/amaterur to play against 1.e4 as Black is 1...c4, and against 1.d4 as Black is the Nimzo Indian (1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6).
As White, try learning the Queen's Gambit (1.d4, followed in varying order by c4, Nc3, Nf3, and e3), as Black cannot effectively play the sicilian against it.
lance, at lunch today, I finished up the chapter and exercises on back rank mate and well into the chapter on overloaded pieces and deflection in Seirawan's tactics book. Then I went on chess.com and solved the tactics puzzle first try, 10 seconds. That never happens to me! Coincidence. It was easy today. Even for me. Thanks again.
Good stuff! I thought the puzzle was neat. Not every puzzle has to involve three sacrifices for mate in 6 
.
Or your take on my impression of the openings in the topical categries I posted above.
Ok.
Part of the draw of the hypermoderns for me as a beginner is that a lot of players at my level don’t know that much about them.
True. They may have some traps memorized in 1.e4 or 1.d4 openings, but not likely in these ones.
One of my original interests in the hypermoderns was to put more emphasis on tactics. The asymitry between white and black is supposed to make for sharp counterplay.
Probably does, generally speaking. One reason 1.e4 is usually recommended to beginners is that often in those lines the center pawns come off the board quickly, leading to an open game with a tactical fight right away. For example, Petroff's defence: 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.Nxe5 and there's a tactical battle raging already! 3...Nxe4?! is a mistake potentially leading to a trap: 4.Qe2 Nf6 5.Nc6+! winning the queen.
Early in the game though the hypermoderns feel more positional than tactical. Yeah.
I think the hypermodern games in their transition from opening to middle game are very positional. An understanding of pawn structures, weak and strong squares, active and inactive minor pieces, is very helpful.
True.
When and where you push a pawn or capture a minor piece may have big consequences. Maybe they have just as big a consequences in the classical openings
They do. As always, the "right move" in a situation depends on the situation on the board. For example, consider the incorrect pawn capture in Petroff's defence mentioned above, or the different character of the game that can result from the 4.Ba4 variation of the Ruy Lopez/Morphy's Defence vs the exchange variation.
I enjoy playing positional in the beginning - This was what triggered me to comment on this thread in the first place. I used to think so too, then I realized I was just weak on tactics. But I've already made my point here so I digress.
Do you feel that positional considerations generally play a bigger role in the transition from opening to middle game in the hypermodern lines than in the classical? I'll cautiously answer yes. Someone (Botvinnik?) said that "tactics flow from superior positions." So positional considerations are always important, in any opening and any middle game (endgames too, in some sense, but they're different - it doesn't matter if you have a 'superior' pawn structure, if your opponent has a pawn that he's about to promote and you have no way of stopping him, for example).
I thought I would like open games. I’ve read they are easier for beginners, and I had some vague idea that they resulted in more straight forward tactics. They're not necessarily easier, it's more that they tend to result in beginners having their mistakes punished a lot quicker and a lot more brutally - forcing them to learn to recognize threats, etc.
I think of the Ruy Lopez as being a tall tree. The tree would be wide if there were a lot of variations (branches.) I think of the Sicilian as being a wide tree, and a tall too, for that matter. Good analogy. The Sicilian especially has a huge amount of theory behind it. But, below say 1800+, how many players are going to stay 'in the book' for 10-12 moves?
For correspondence, of course, you can refer to the book, and you still probably won’t need it unless you’re playing someone around 1800+. That's what I meant to say.
I haven’t played the KID yet
I toyed with it and some of the related black defences to 1.d4, for a while. They seem pretty solid. My understanding is that these defences were developed to help black deal with some of the problems with the QGD (like his queen's bishop being blocked in by the e-pawn). For now I've gone back to meeting 1.d4 with 1...d5, though.
I do think this is a major positive consideration for the hypermoderns for advanced beginners. There’s not that much theory that needs to be memorized below, say, rating 1600. That's true. The thing is, I've heard people say "I know the such-and-such opening, but I just don't know what to do after that." Knowing what to do afterward is the main point of 'knowing' the opening! There's more to knowing an opening then just memorizing lines and variations. Sounds like you already understand this though.
Thanks, lance. That's about how I've seen it.
I also think that the opening books on the KIA, KID, Pirc teach quite a bit about position in the early part of the game and ideas and tactics in the middle part of the game. Perhaps because the theory isn't so thoroughly done in these openings, there is more emphasis on positions and ideas in the text books.
All of the books by Gallagher on the KID are great.
Pirc Alert by Albert & Chernin, also great.
Everyman Chess "Starting Out" series on these openings is pretty good, too.
if your a fan of hypermodern openings you should try the hippo system
Hypermodern Openings typically annoy the heck out of me. Probably because I know a very good player who plays the Pirc against me and he always wins. I wish you best of luck as you continue towards success.
Gambitking, get with the program. This has turned into a pro-hypermodern thread. You're rocking the boat ;).
Thanks for the tactic. ztron tried to play something like that against me early in my first game with him. It didn't quite work out for him, but it did give me some trouble. You do have to watch out for the combo of B on the b2-g8 diagonal and Ng5
I'm totally kidding on the rocking the boat comment. Diversity of thought is good. Especially if you're gonna throw some trap info my way. Thanks.
KillaBeez, that's one of the two great endorsements of any opening in my opinion :). One is the "I love playing it" comment. The other is the "I hate playing against it" comment. That's one angle that I haven't seen explored here much. The question, "What openings do you hate playing against, and why?"
I've only played against it a couple times, but so far, if I want to win, I hate playing against the sicillian. Maybe I should learn it :). Of course, it's a big it! That's why I've avoided it. I wonder if it would suffice to learn just one variation, like the dragon? The dragon seems to fit in well the the hypermoderns.
No problem. The problem with learning very theoretical openings is that it is easy to forget some of the main lines, causing you to get in a bad position because you played the moves out of order or you got motifs mixed up. But you learn from it!
Lance and Aqua
Thanks to both of you for your excellent conversation, I have found it very helpful. One more thing I might add (and lance kind of touched on it) is that I found that I played "better" (or lasted longer) against computers using closed games which kept the tactics down and this lead me to starting playing with a hypermodern repertoire and believing I had a "positional" style of play.
When I started playing humans I would get slaughtered, I was playing too passively. Had to bite the bullet and hit the tactics puzzles in a serious way. I had heard about beginners learning tactics 1,000,000 times but had to get my ass kicked plenty of times before I would listen.
So I guess my experience says that you need to be careful using computer games to learn about openings and your style.
Burnaby
PS Another useful bit of advice I got was that you should only spend 20% of your study time on Openings. Comments?
Ah, I hadn't picked up on the Kan variation of the Sicilian. If I've seen it mentioned before I probably thought the reference was to the Caro-Kann. The Caro-Kann looks like another center pawn gambit, though maybe not technically.
Thanks, I will look at the Sicilian Kan. Some day I want to read more about the gambits, too.
To lance and Burnaby's point about not spending too much time on openings as a beginner, I agree in principle. But I just plain find the topic interesting. I probably spend 40% of my time in the openings. But I'm including study of the ideas behind them, positional considerations, and entire games that result from them. I find it interesting, so if it isn't the absolute fastest track to improvement, that's ok. I'm enjoying the journey. And 50% goes to tactics and endgame. 10% to strategy. Strategy is really interesting, too.
Ah, as I think about it now, I started out the first few months 100% on tactics. But then rapidly moved to 50% opening and strategy, 50% tactics and endgame. Then within each of those two 50% buckets I shift around on how much time I put in to the two topics in the bucket. (Was 50% strategy for a while, for example, but now 40% opening/10% strategy.) I hadn't consciously thought about it before, but I see some connection between tactics and endgame, both technical. And opening and strategy, both, well, strategy.
Here's another consideration I've wondered about in choosing an opening. This is probably just amateur rambling, but not sure. Maybe there's some validity to the question.
Are there some openings that give either black or white more control over the line that results? In other words, are there some openings where all or most of the best branch nodes in the opening are decided by one color?
To illustrate what I'm thinking about, in the Pirc and the KID, black get's to chose the modern defense, but then if white decides to play a main line of the opening, white gets to chose the major variation. In particular, I can chose the Pirc as black against 1.e4, but white then chooses whether we play the Australian Attack (4.f4), or the modern (4.Bg5), or something else.
I initially got the impression that it might somehow be different with the Sicilians. Otherwise, why bother saying, "I like to play so-and-so (dragon, closed, Kan, etc.) Sicilian as black," when there's about a 1 in 15 (my estimate of the number of major variations) chance that white will take you down the variation that you like. And that's anti-Sicilians aside. Looking over a few of the variations just now (this post edited after it's initial writing) it looks like indeed white get's to chose the major variation in the Sicilians. This would seem to give validity to the recommendation I've read (well above in this thread I think) for those who don't like to play the Sicilian as white to experiment some more and find a variation that they are comfortable with. So in general it looks like black chooses the Sicilian, but white chooses the major variation. Is that right? Maybe at least sometimes when people have commented, "I like to play so-and-so variation of the Sicilian," or "you should try so-and-so variation of the Sicilian," I've mentally inserted "as black" when the writer was intending to communicate "as white." matthiassmall, when you suggested the Kan, were you thinking as white, or as black, or both?
Anyway, any comments here on whether some openings give either white or black more control over the line that results?
Well, I finally got to play the KID. It went just the way it was supposed to. Push the f-pawn and attack on the King side. Very rewarding!
After four KIA games and four Pirc games and this one KID, I actually feel more confident as black than as white. The mental model I have as black with the KID and Pirc is that I'm behind in the beginning which is inevitable for black anyway, but that's ok, I'll catch up to slightly ahead when I make the right pawn push. The feeling I have as white with the KIA is that I'm playing catch up from the beginning, and am often slightly behind coming out of the opening. With the KIA it's sometimes like I'm struggling just to be able stop black's e5, and when I push e4 which is the usual, it doesn't seem to reveal any particularly good chances. I feel that my opponents get the best of me in the beginning and I'm relying on their making mistakes later that give me chances.
I know, I need to play more than just a few games, and I'm high on black coming off the KID win.
Funny thing is I started this post after having tripped over the Reti and then KIA, and was asking what I might play as black that is similar. Now I'm happier with the Pirc and KID than with the Reti and KIA. I'll explain further in the next post.
Here's the KID game. My annotations may not be perfect, but they explain what I was thinking.
That KID game above is the first time I've successfully planned and executed an attack on the king from early in the game. That was fun! I wanna do more of that. I'm thinking of buying a couple books on the Colle-Zukertort. It looks like a simple opening for white designed specifically for attacking chances on the king side.
The Reti still seems interesting, but it doesn't look like you play the same thing no matter what your opponent plays. Rather, it's broad and flexible and you adjust it for black's defense. I think it might be better for the person who already knows a lot of openings and has become a pretty good positional player. I do like that it involves advance of the c pawn versus the more usual e-pawn for the KIA. In the moderns I like the idea of advancing the pawns immediately flanking the d and e files. Let your opponent have d and e in the beginning, then attack with c or f pawns.
The other problem for the Reti is that I haven't found any move-by-move books that will hold my hand for awhile, the likes of the Starting Out series, or "Pirc Alert" for the Pirc. There's Eric Shiller's book that gives a nice overview of the Reti against many different defenses, and a couple games and some good pointers for each, but doesn't really hold your hand with move-by-move explanations. I may soon be beyond needing that, but for now I still like it.
I'll keep working on the KIA because it's simple and similar structural features to the KID and Pirc. But I think I'm gonna give the Colle some serious effort. There's a Starting Out book, and another book titled "The Dogs Of War," that look good from the excerpts and reviews at Amazon.
Thoughts?
By the way, I finished most of Seirawan's tactics book, including; deflections, decoys, batteries, clearance sacrifices, and mates. That knowledge didn't hurt at all in the KID game. Just trying to earn the right to spend some more time on openings ;). "I'm still learnin' tactics. I got my mind right, boss!"
lance, at lunch today, I finished up the chapter and exercises on back rank mate and well into the chapter on overloaded pieces and deflection in Seirawan's tactics book. Then I went on chess.com and solved the tactics puzzle first try, 10 seconds. That never happens to me! Coincidence. It was easy today. Even for me. Thanks again.
I'm still interested in people's take on the Indian's and Pirc, as distinct from the other openings. Or your take on my impression of the openings in the topical categries I posted above.