At club level, I would say 1. People do not care very much what openings you play, and if they do, they don't usually prepare a line that wins. However, once players get close to 1700 or 1800, it becomes more important, because people put much more effort into the opening. People have the ability and desire to prepare a winning novelty. Then, it becomes more important to play different openings. At Class B level to master, I think opening variety scored an 8 for necessity. Once you are a grandmaster, it scores 10 out of 10.
Opening Variety
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Jul 29, 2008
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#3
KillaBeez wrote:
I think that opening variety is extremely important. It helps teach important concepts within certain types of positions and gives the player better experience. I also think that it is good to not be predictable. I know a guy who has almost a 2300 rating, yet can be beaten quite easily by Class A players.
Then he will not be "almost 2300" for very long. How did he get there? Not by "easily" losing to 1800s. Sigh.
Opening variety is so important for OTB tournament players. To become 2300 OTB you need to be very good opening player in the sense that you cannot play the same lines over and over again. That is not to say that specialising in an opening is a bad thing. In fact, everyone should have one opening they love to play and can play very well and dont fear openings preparing for their favourite lines.
When it comes to preparing for an opponent at a tournament, lets say you play Najdorf but he has played 6.Bg5, 6.Be3, 6.Be2 and 6.g3. The white player has played a variety of lines and made it almost impossible to predict what he will play next! 6.Rg1 might crop up or he could even re-play another line in the english attack. In this situation the Black player will have a long night of re-capping on his opening prep.
Compare that to the situation when White simply always plays 6.Be3 consistently dating back almost 5 years. Its highly unlikely that he will switch to 6.Bg5 over night!
Players online can get away with playing one line in each opening since nobody knows who anyone is. Even if you do see the same opponents appear its unlikely that you will prepare for a social internet game. Isint this the reason why more 'easy to learn', dubious, odd gambit openings etc are played online?
Opening variety for OTB tournament (not club) is important 9/10.
Opening variety for internet play and club play (social chess basically) is not very important 2/10. BUT, playing the same ol stuff is gonna get boring.
Okay. It is never easy to beat a 2300 rated player. That said, he is VERY predictable. It does take a lot of memorization to get an advantage, but it will pay off. Not many people have really studied his games and do not get the clue on his repertoire. Since he mainly plays in Swiss Tournaments, usually his opponents are not very prepared for him. One of my friends memorized 40 moves deep in the Winawer Poisoned Pawn and ended up beating him like a drum. But very few people can do that.
I think that opening variety is extremely important. It helps teach important concepts within certain types of positions and gives the player better experience. I also think that it is good to not be predictable. I know a guy who has almost a 2300 rating, yet can be beaten quite easily by Class A players. He always plays the exact same lines in the exact same openings and everybody knows it. All you have to do is prepare an advantageous line in the opening 40 moves deep and he will follow the line and end up losing. So my question is this. On a scale of 1-10, how important is opening variety?