what is a good opening for a amateur chess player

Thank you

I wish I had thought of it. I read it from an interview with Kramnik.

He said he can't quite explain it, but he thinks a player should follow the natural progression of the history of chess starting with Steinitz

(I think it's logical too, so when he says he can't quite explain it I wonder what he means exactly)

I really should have thought of it. It's really genius.

Street racing comes from the Prohibition times when bootleggers/gangsters were running away from cops.

In the movie The Fast and the Furious, there was a street race. But the word got out to the police, so the police came by to break it up, and they ran away from the police. The movie tells the history of street racing.

The introduction of Top Gun got it right.

"Top Gun" was instituted in 1969 to teach the lost art of dogfighting invented in WWI (1914) because of over reliance on new missile technologies.

We learned dogfighting from . . . dogs. This is how a fighter and his wigman works.

I am glad that Winning Chess Openings worked for you, but

"... everyone is different, so what works for one person may likely fail with another ..." - NM Dan Heisman (2002)

https://web.archive.org/web/20140627084053/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/heisman19.pdf

You were “taking up chess again” and perhaps already had a fair amount of experience? In any event, for many of us, without illustrative games, it is hard to get much out of an exposition on the “theory/principals” of one opening after another. I wonder if such a presentation helps very many to identify ”one or two” openings with which one will be “most comfortable”. Discovering Chess Openings does not attempt to cover “most openings a beginner is going to encounter”, and, consequently, I think that it is able to do a better job explaining things that an under-1000 player needs to know about the center, development, etc. Attempting to read 2, 3, or 4 books can certainly be “information overload” if the books are mostly just collections of stuff to memorize. On the other hand, if the reading is mostly illustrative games, it can be an instructive experience that does not have to be undertaken all at once in order to be helpful.

Yeah, Paul Keres's opponents had such an easy time when he replied 1...e5

I know this is off topic, but what's interesting to me is why they decided to have so many shots with a dark foreground and bright background. The main character (whether it's a person or jet) is often silhouetted. It really stands out because you don't often see that.

I guess it fits with the music and everything, and of course it's a well known and popular film... but

Just imagine how you'd make an action movie about young men and fighter jets... the first thing that comes to mind isn't this ambient music and silhouetted characters. They're building up this elegant atmosphere, and maybe that's a nice contrast to the action that comes later. I don't know, but it's obviously on purpose and AFAIK it's not common.

If I remember correctly, there was a decision to add more scenes to the movie after most of the filming was done. The story goes that they did the extra filming in such a way as to avoid the necessity to closely match with character appearances in other parts of the film.

Interesting.

At the beginner level, I suspect that one’s opponents will know more about 1 e4 e5 than about 1 e4 c5, but perhaps one does not have to advance very far before encountering opponents knowing about both.

Interesting Top Gun fact:

Charlie's "older man" date at the officer's club is the real-life "Viper", Pete Pettigrew. He is a retired Navy pilot and TOP GUN instructor, and shot down a MiG during the Vietnam War. He served as the technical consultant on the film.

Look for ones where you can think for the first 15 moves or so in the game.  That's where most traps show up for starters.