Hi, I'm looking for a videos that will help me to look at chess openings REALLY deep.

Most might know GothamChess, it's helpful but I need anything deeper. For example just look at this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUK6y9a1L4M

Russian video about Italian game, 1h26m..and it's only first of 3 videos. This guy recorded about 4.5 hours about Italian game and that's awesome! 

I really would like to find any content like this. Any suggests? 

Chess Openings Resources for Beginners and Beyond...

https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell/openings-resources-for-beginners-and-beyond

https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell

If we are talking about free Youtube content, the best opening videos are from Saint Louis chess club (to my knowledge). They don't have videos on every variation, but they have some and in great detail considering that is free content.

For instance they have 10 videos on Najdorf which are around 10 hours long in total.

Hanging Pawns have more detailed videos than Gotham (Levy generally only has videos up to 10 minutes long which is not that useful). But bear in mind that Hanging Pawns is around 2 000 FIDE  rated and there are some mistakes in his videos. His videos are around 30 minutes long each and he covered around 80-90% of serious variations.

So my advice, look for Saint Louis videos, or just google a variation you are interested in, there are some good videos from other channels as well. GM Neiskans have his boot camp series and some of those videos are 3 hours long. Then there is chessbase India where some GMs are guests and they talk about certain opening variations.

In any case, my advice is not to try to memorize to much. Watch videos and then look up 20 or so games from the variation and try to draw some conclusions: which pawn breaks are thematic, is there some recurring tactic lurking and so on... Of course you can always check the opening explorer as well.

You don't really need something "deeper" in the openings because your games are not decided by nuances in the opening. If you know the general ideas of the opening, play some games and analyze them carefully afterwards, check them with an opening database to see where you or your opponent deviated from theory. This way you'll learn your openings slowly but surely through your own play instead of watching and memorizing tons and tons of variations that won't come up in your games.

That is of course correct, but some people just like watching videos on openings. And some ideas are mentioned, so it will not hurt as long as it is not pure memorization.

#5
It does not hurt, but it does not help either.

Don't din when you dive.

And don't dine when you drive.

https://support.chess.com/article/437-how-do-i-get-better-at-chess

Hi, 

Maybe some of this helps to improve and it is more than opening play. 

Thanks 

Any suggests about REALLY deep dinve into openings?

Yes. Don't !

Re: all those folks talking about not doing deep dives into openings?  I used to not like that advice until I actually played in some OTB tourneys.  It turns out they're right.  (That's not to say don't look at videos, just don't spend your time memorizing stuff -- unless you have comparatively unlimited chess study time.  Otherwise, spend time more efficiently).

Here's a simple test.  Look at your last 10 losses.  With the aid of an engine, as yourself the following question: did you miss a tactic that you could have played that would have won you at least a pawn, or did you allow such a tactic?  Dan Heisman asserts that when there are two players who are under 1600, the odds are 99% that at least one of them missed at least one tactic.

If that's the case, then the most efficient road to improvement, he asserts, is "removing the negatives" (i.e., missing tactics) rather than "adding positives" (learning strategies and openings).

That doesn't mean you should spend 100% of the time studying tactics.  But it is to say that you get your most bang for your buck by putting the following four homeworks at the top of your priority list:  tactics, playing, analyzing one's own games, and reading annotated game collections.

Again, that's not to say don't learn anything else!  But, as everybody keeps saying, don't invest too much time into openings if you're going to miss a tactic later on anyway.

The comments about tactics usually deciding the game is correct, but I enjoy studying openings, so deep diving into openings is big part of what I do when preparing for a game. I find videos are more useful in learning the main ideas while books are better for a deep dive. What I normally do is the following.

Step one: learn the main ideas of an opening by watching videos. I use DVDs more than youtube for this mainly because I feel the quality of the analysis is much better in the DVDs most of the time.

Step two: get a good book on an opening and play through every line in the book of the variation you want to play including all subvaiations and foot notes.

Step three: Go through the book again but this time try to guess what the moves are and identify what the ideas are in each move. Also when I see a subvariation I try to visualize the entire variation without moving the pieces. I find this to be very helpful in seeing the ideas even when Im not as successful as I would like to be in calculating the entire line.

step four: Identify lines that dont make sense to me and analyze them with an engine. In some cases I miss a tactical idea that arent mentioned in the book. In other cases I find myself disagreeing with the author and use the engine to help me create a novelty.

step five: Hire a titled player to play training games against. Most are willing to help practice a specific opening but what I normally do is do the above steps for several different openings and hopefully whatever the master plays I will have some prep for. If I dont then step six will be more useful than normal.

step six: analyze the training game with the master I played against.

step seven: analyze the game with my regular coach. I often like to get a second opinion.

step eight: study the analysis of my coach and the training game master with the aide of an engine for an even deeper dive.

step nine: laugh as my opponent negates my opening preparation by entering an exchange french with white. The last time this happened my opponent sacrificed a pawn for structural weakness, I found a tactic to trade queens off  a pawn up, and then my opponent somehow missed a simple tactic with over 30 minutes left on his clock and lost a piece and I won easily.

I second the idea that you don't need to learn the openings deeply. There are so many more areas where you can improve that will lead to more wins and better chess than studying the openings deeply. I think it's also a hard thing to do at around 1500 rating. Your chess understanding is not yet at a level, where you'll easily understand the underlying ideas of a position. This frequently leads to players just learning the moves. That's a very bad way of learning opening, cause you will be on your own when the opponent makes a mistake and then you will need to be able to think about and play the position on your own. Knowing moves can also really cause you to think you've improved, when in reality you haven't much at all, because the underlying ideas are still very unclear to you. In reality around 1500 rating you see that people make big mistakes after the moves they've learned are done, gifting away the advantage they had carefully built by studying so many hours.

The best way to learn an opening is to do this by looking at the ideas of the opening. You can do this with grandmaster games with comments, preferably as the theory develops through time. So you start with a game from 40 years ago with old theory. Then you'll gradually see what changed and why it changed. New moves are thought up, because they are better responses to old ideas. This will focus much more on the ideas. It also means you know more about different possible ideas if your opponent makes an inferior move at some point. This way of looking at openings is not always available in books, but can also be done with a database. Apart from this, it might also be a good idea to look at games by strong players versus bad players. If there is a big difference in playing strength you usually see the ideas in action a lot better than between two grandmaster games. Books and videos also don't often show you this. 

I play at the expert/master level, and I don't dive deep into openings. I don't know the names of most variations, except for the most basic ones.

Though I do strive to understand the openings that I play, in a positional sense. This way, if my opponent goes out of book, (or goes down a line that I haven't yet seen) it hopefully won't matter to me either way.

In theory or not - your goal should be to always have a decent idea of what to do. This doesn't mean that you have memorized all the possibilities ... or that you always know what to do ... but rather, it means that you're familiar with the basic ideas and thematic moves that correlate with your specific opening.

So, ideally, you can use that sense of familiarity to guide you toward a logical plan, in any position.

This comes from understanding your openings positionally, rather than from learning specific lines ...

For me, that familiarity has come a lot from seeing grandmaster games (as others above me have mentioned). Databases can be especially helpful.

When looking at GM games, I don't try to memorize lines ... I simply try to understand the opening ideas. See enough games, with the same ideas, and the logic behind the moves will begin to make sense.

Doing it this way also teaches you to think about the position, and to discover the ideas on your own ... rather than having the ideas and answers fed to you, via a video ...

So what's the moral of that story?

Spend a *ton* of hours learning an opening, have your opponent play out of book, and you *still* have a game that turns on a tactic!

So: learn tactics not deep-dive into openings! 

Of course, learning should be fun, and if you enjoy learning openings, by all means -- but if a person doesn't have unlimited hours and wants to maximize his efficiency, then improving in tactics, board vision, etc., is the way to go.

Looking at GM Games

Many people have told me that.  The problem is that they are playing over my head and so I don't understand what's going on.  Think, e.g., of a person who has never seen American Football seeing a football game for the first time.  I can see blitzing linebackers, I can understand the pros and cons of stacking the defensive line on a particular play, and countering it by perhaps a draw or a pass-option,  I know what "four down territory" means -- my friend just sees 22 bodies flying around.

And so, the entree into looking at GM games are to read good annotated collections that are intended to teach the reader.  I've learned a tremendous amount doing that.

As for me, I'm working my way through Dan Heisman's list (conveniently listed in an order one can follow).  I'll list the first ten here (for more, see https://www.danheisman.com/recommended-book-lists.html)

======================

Game Collections ("instructive game anthologies" = game books written for the explicit purpose of helping the reader, at a certain level, improve. Most "X's Best Games" books are not written primarily for instructive purposes)

Recommended Instructive Game Anthologies (in roughly ascending order of difficulty):

• Logical Chess Move by Move - Irving Chernev
• The World's Most Instructive Amateur Game Book - Heisman
• Chess: The Art of Logical Thinking - Neil McDonald
• (Note: the non-anthology A First Book of Morphy by del Rosario can be read here)
• Simple Attacking Plans - Wilson - contains a variety of master-master, master-amateur & amateur-amateur games
• The Most Instructive Games of Chess Ever Played - Irving Chernev
• The Art of Planning in Chess - Neil McDonald
• Winning Chess Brilliancies - Yasser Seirawan
• Chess Master vs. Chess Amateur - Euwe and Meiden
• Best Lessons of a Chess Coach - Weeramantry and Eusebi

==============

#1 -- read it.  Really enjoyed it.  Learned a lot

#2 -- I'm working my way through.  One can learn a lot more from mistakes than seeing games of "near perfect play" where one doens't often understand why the move is so good -- so this is a great niche book.  Many of the mistakes in the book are exactly the ones I would have made.

#3 -- I'm loving it.  Like #1, every move is annotated.  I'm about halfway through.  The game choices are great, fun, and all are recent (i.e., last 50 years), and McDonald writes well.

That's as far as I've gotten.  Enjoying it!

Those are good books on that list. I've read many of them. #1 and #3 were two of my favorites, for quite a long time.

And I agree with you that quality books are terrific learning resources.

As for reviewing GM games - yes, one drawback is that some (or many) moves might seem too bewildering to understand. Though this can also be a benefit, as it can force the player to think about the move, rather than simply pressing "play" on a video, to have the move explained to them, without any required thought.

I focus on GM games that align with my repertoire. If I see a popular move that I don't understand, I glance at several games with that move, to see how things to turn out. Often, the idea becomes more clear, once you've seen it in action, across many different games.

Also, not all GMs play the same lines. You can pick and choose the lines that make the most sense to you, while still feeling confident that the moves are reasonable (otherwise GMs would not have played them).

One doesn't have to always choose the most popular mainlines to follow. You can choose a really obscure line to add to your toolbelt, if the ideas in it make sense to you ...

I completely understand where you're coming from. I feel this is one of the main reasons strong players keep saying 'don't invest time in the opening, but focus on other things.' There is 1 other suggestion that works around this problem though and that is to look at strong players' games (not necessarily GM, but 2300+ should be fine) and see what they do against much lower rated players (like 1700). If you see enough of those, you can get a real quick feel for some general ideas. If you do it for both sides, you'll get a quick overview of general ideas in a position or stuff to watch out for. But totally agree that commented games are absolutely vital to really understand. 

Thanks @Stil1 and @RAU4ever -- good comments.

Let me add yet another option.  Back when I was a newbie (like, 6 months ago) and I didn't know/follow this advice, I did purchase a number of "Starting Out" books for openings.  As you can guess (and probably as many of the novices here like me can guess), since I was sort of starting from scratch, there were just too many moves to know what was going on, and I was unable to even get a feel for the opening.

In the meantime, over the last couple of months, since I play 1d4, a number of folks play QGD against me, and I started getting a feel for it.  So, I went back to my McDonald, Starting Out: QGD book, and not only did it make more sense *BUT* he also has a section right in Chapter 1 called "some typical disasters for black".

Wow!  A big lightbulb when off over my head!  And this encapsulates the problem of reading GM games.

A major move for white in QGD is either Qc2 or Rc1, because of pressure on the c-file.  As a newbie, all I see are a whole bunch of other pieces on the c-file, and I couldn't see how to exert that pressure.  And -- this is key -- in a GM game, black will successfully deal with that pressure, which leads the newbie like me to think: so then why play Rc1 to begin with.  I just didn't get it.

*But* -- after reading that section I saw what Rc1 or Qc2 can do if black *doesn't* handle the c-file pressure properly.

Best news: over the last two weeks I won two games because of this very section of the book.  I played Rc1 or Qc2 -- even though there was a knight and a bishop, and sometimes a pawn, ahead of it.  But with a pawn take and a recapture by one of the pieces then -- boom -- the rook (or queen) is staring at a black piece on c6 or c7.

So, for me, at this point, to see the import of the move, I need to see what the mistake could be by not playing it and/or the opponent mistakenly not seeing the strength/power of that move --  and I need help (annotations) to help point that out for me.  But this is not to disagree with @Stil1 or @RAU4ever ! -- I can see utility in those methods also (it's harder work, but, yeah, the harder work probably engenders deeper (or longer lasting) understanding)

Check out this game between Federau, Juergen (2220) and Schueler, Wolfgang (2068), Berlin, 2005 (so, even a 2000 player didn't see this in this game!)

Thanks for  the reply sholom90 .......I do enjoy openings and not just learning what is in the books but also what is not in the books. The most enjoyable part is when I see some analysis that I feel is not very good and I try to come up with an improvement....drawing from ideas in other lines and working with an engine.  Although I do find this enjoyable, I get the feeling its overkill for a player of my level.

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I do get your point. about tactics. I play in the FICS 45+45 league and I remember I had one particularly bad season a while back. In one of those league games I lost because I missed tactic after tactic that could have won me the game. After that game I resolved to study tactics and I did so at the tune of 20+ hours a week for at least a month. I reaped the rewards of that effort the very next season. I scored 5.5/6.0 and I won one of those games in 19 moves. 

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At the moment however I am concentrating more on studying endgames than tactics or openings. I am reading "Fundamental chess endings" and intend to read it cover to cover. At the moment Im not making great progress but that is mostly because of Atlanta Braves baseball fever and Auburn Tigers football fever. lol

I'm impressed on how much effort/time you devote to openings!  That's impressive.  I just don't have that much time in one sitting . . . . I have time in various time slots.  (Sort of like the short-attention-span generation, even though I'm a baby boomer!)

And so, despite my talk about spending lots of time on tactics and annotated games -- I also can't resist learning "new things".

(Tangent: I have taken the Bain book exercises and make them into flashcards -- using free Anki software.  The flashcards include other mistakes I've made in games and or openings I've bungled.  I study those 30 minutes every day).

For endings, I have Silman's Endgame Course -- I really like how he breaks down his chapters into levels (class E players read this chapter, class D read the next chapter, etc.).  I recommend it to anyone who in new to endgames (or new enough that they've never heard of Lucena and Philador.  I'm pretty new myself -- that's where I first learned about Opposition, e.g.).  OTOH, I felt that the treatment of the subjects that *were* level-appropriate for me weren't in depth enough.

Muller & Lamprecht, FCE is, of course, an all time classic.  I don't own it, but there's only so much you can cover one volume.  I found a used copy of M & L's Secrets of Pawn Endings.  I love it.  It's 280 or so pages (compare to how much in FCE is about pawns).  It gets awesome reviews.  I'm also simultaneously reading McDonald, Starting Out: Rook Endings, which also gets good reviews.  (Bishops and Knights?  I'll get to them some time in the future!)