Easiest opening to learn for beginners ..

Bankwell, I get it too.

Are you sure Bankwell is a Mr?

Do trolls have a gender?Even if they do , it doesn't really matter.They are  an insult for either gender.

I'm neither a chess teacher nor a strong player, but I can recognise a fallacious argument when I see one.

You can't legitimatley back up your "unique ... personal system" by appealing to your years of teaching experience and the number of students you've coached, while simultaneously criticising "many of the 'norms' of conventional, traditional chess instruction" which "strike [you] as absurd" and as "a boatload of traditional nonsense", because those norms have come from ... wait for it ... many, many other chess teachers spending many, many years teaching and coaching many, many students.

If something is a "norm", then it implies the majority of chess teachers and coaches who have just as much as experience as you do have agreed with it - it wouldn't have become a "norm" if they hadn't. Unless you have some kind of special experience which has been generally unavailable to other chess teachers, then if your "unique ... personal system" diverges from "conventional wisdom" it actually contradicts what experience has generally shown to be best, so you can't appeal to your own experience to back it up.

Of course, it's still possible that you're right - perhaps you've stumbled upon the one right way to teach which has eluded other chess teachers throughout history. People rail against conventional wisdom in all kinds of fields, and while most of the time they're wrong, every now and again someone is right and conventional wisdom changes after a period of resistance. If, in 10 to 15 years' time, your system has become the majority view, then it'll show you were right. But, in this case, it still wouldn't be the mere amount of your experience which was responsible for the superiority of your system, but rather some kind of personal genius.

I suspect that the reality is that brand new players are going to play badly whether you teach them openings or not, that there are as many different good ways of teaching as there are combinations of teachers and students, and that many, many different ways of teaching rank beginners are probably just as good as each other. If a beginner enjoys the game, plays a lot, and gets quality instruction of some kind then they are likely to improve beyond recognition in those first couple of years regardless of the details of that instruction, so it probably doesn't make a whole lot of difference in the scheme of things. The overwhelming majority of beginners are not going to become grandmasters, so teaching them what they enjoy and what they are interested in is probably going to be a better approach in most cases than making them strictly follow some system or other.

This discussion has been hijacked. 

IM P, I understand your idea of not teaching a beginner more than 5 moves, but I still would not call that coaching, in a real sense. 

I remember a local coach here in Pensacola. He passed away a few years back, but he was very well-known in this area. (He coached very young boys that played football.) I could watch him for hours, he would go over the same point 10 times, if that is what it took his charges to understand. Then he would draw up simple plays, and actually walk them through the entire process. It is no wonder that his teams won so many "Pop Warner" championships over the years. 

colle is great!

NM FLchessplayer

The fact that you teach 35 years doesn't mean you do it right.

I have met a lot that teach even more and do it the wrong way.

The fact that Botvinnik agrees with pfren and considers opening completely useless for beginners gives us 2 controversial conclusions:

1)Either you are right or

2)Botvinnik is right

What do you think?

To be fair, there are probably a number of GM's who don't consider openings useless for a beginner. It's not a black and white subject, I certainly think there are better areas once a beginner knows the principles though.

Opening is useless for beginners.The number of GMs that don't consider it useless are the ones that get paid for it.It is well known that the easy way to get easy and lot of  money from begginers is to promise them that you will give them a "killer opening repertoire".The same is true for books also.

Uhhh... who is that patzer, Botvinnik?

Did he manage to make a couple of his students national masters, or not?     

LOL ya i think a few russian masters (which for people who dont know Russian master was considered equivelant to GM, I believe)... and world champions 

One key to remember is that the Russian school was designed to make GM's the vast majority of people never got a chance to attend the school and those that did were already strong players before they entered. Candidate master level or higher I believe was a minimum requirement. a 2250 FIDE friend of mine and I laughed about a chess camp that was being offered by Ivanchuk and some other masters where the MINIMUM level was 2400... 

My experience with watching players play closed systems is that it creates an artifical sense of safety . Players that do this tend to miss out on dynamic play and never grow. (This was my own weakness and one that i work hard on with my students never letting them hide behind a strength and avoid weaknesses.)

Botvinnik's school was accepting kids from all levels if they were promising.Karpov was on it from his very first steps , long before he gets any title, Kasparov the same.

your wrong actually, From age 7, Kasparov attended the Young Pioneer Palace in Baku and, at 10 began training at Mikhail Botvinnik's chess school 

The Young Pioneer Palace is where players of any level could attend and was used as a training ground for a lot of sports.

they were promising but also already strong players Kasparov started the botvinnik school at 10. (wiki) my guess is that he was 2000+ at the time based on how other talented players were. Kramnik wasnt admitted until he was a candidate master. (2100)

I am not wrong about Karpov, Karpov was in Botvinnik's school before he get any title.

from Wiki

Karpov's early rise in chess was swift, as he became aCandidate Master by age eleven. At twelve, he was accepted into Mikhail Botvinnik's prestigious chess school

None of these school accepted people unless they were proven to be talented AND skilled. there was a minimum requirement and had to have a sponsor I believe

I don't know if you are right or wrong but I know for sure that you should consider using more rational and less polemical arguments.

I think we agree that Botwinnik isn't some kind of god who can't possibly be wrong. But what's the point of your reasoning then?

According to Averbach  on an article about Karpov in a Shakhatyi Bulletin , Karpov was accepted in Botvinnik's schol long before he becomes a candidate master.Wiki pedia is not always right.

Karpov claims in his "Karpov on Karpov" book that he did not get many chess ideas from Botvinnik's school (he gave most credits to his trainer, Semyon Furman), but he was extremely influenced by Botvinnik's attitude towards chess, AND life.

So we know beginers need Tactics, and Endgames, but what about some sort of Stratagy, the most a beginer should know about the opening are the principles, and maybe 5 moves of a few crittical openings(plus a few traps so long as they don't intend to use them) control the center, develop rapidly, and get the king to the safest place possible, even if its e1.

I AGREE WITHSIRD=== NOBODY IS PERFECT===