Studying openings at your level is useless as no one understands or know how to play openings. What happens is that they memorize moves, have no idea why those moves are made and really don't have a clue when the opponent doesn't play a book move or theory.
So what do you do? You learn opening principles:
Fight for the center.
Develop towards the center.
Castle.
After that you do the following:
You blunder check your moves.
You ask: "What is my opponent trying to do?"
And after that. The game starts ti get difficult because your now in the middle game.
I peaked as a USCF A player and just not seriously started studying openings. After A LOT of trial and error, I settled on the following:
Caro-Kann.
Slav.
London.
All due to the similar pawn structures and middle games.
Hi all. I couldn't find an answer to this, and it might even be a bit stupid, but it troubles me.
I've studied a few openings, mostly the theory and the mainline. I don't want to get bogged down but I would like to have a solid/safe opening so that I'm set up well for the middle game. (Just enough study for this and no more for me at my rating.)
The problem is that when I start playing with Black (And to a lesser degree white), I might get two moves from my opponent and then all theory is out the window. I know, of course, that they aren't required to play to my opening, but I feel that it seems to be a waste of time studying openings when they are basically useless.
Perhaps it's my low rating and it's just the type of player that I come up against right now.
YouTube makes it seem so easy/perfect. I go here and then my opponent will do this. *Wow that looks like a great opening. Of course, it never goes like YouTube in real life.
I just wondered if anyone else experiences this and what may they have done in this situation.
Thanks for any feedback.