Chess Theory, do you learn it ? How far do you go ?

sorry about the nomenclature, as i am only using rios's names for the pawn structure families and i don't quite remember if he mentions the boleslavsky. i just remember him calling it the najdorf family of structures.

Personally, I tend to believe that consistently playing "system" openings that typically lead to one specific structure... eg: the London System, or deliberately aiming for a Carlesbad minority attack formation... is counter-productive and will slow your growth as a chess player instead of boosting it.

Exposure to a wide variety of middle-game types and tactical themes will teach you more than an endless sequence of minor variations on the same theme.

One reason that I often play the King's Indian Attack as White is that it can (and often does) lead to a rich variety of middle-game positions... everything from a locked King's Indian Reversed to a mobile center phalynx (e4+d4 with no opposing Pawns in the center) to a half-open jump formation similar to a reversed Dragon. Every game is (or has the potential to be) different.

I can understand your frustration. All of us, even champions, get stuck at some point and they do not know why. Everyone knows that the areas for study are tactics, strategy, endgames and openings, so they try to focus on an area where they feel are weaker. In my case, I saw that most of my games were decided by tactical blunders, so I study it a lot. Now I think I can solve puzzles at least like a 2000, yet my overall rating hasn't increased, and I am stuck at 1600. Incredibly, I still make a lot of blunders, even in standard time control. Why? Capablanca said that one should study the endgame first, than tactics, then strategy and then openings, because of their dependencies: you can study tactics knowing very few strategical concepts, but you have to know endgames to solve some positions; you can study strategy and positional play knowing only basic opening principles, but you cannot understand why some positions are dangerous, if you are not tactically aware; you can study opening theory, but you cannot understand why some moves are not even considered, if you don't know strategy well enough. Furthermore, at your level, your opponents deviate from the book quite soon, then you are on your own anyway. To me, the most critical and difficult part to understand is strategy, no matter how many books I read on the subject. It is not enough to understand its principles; it's an art and it is where most of us reach a plateau. In my case, often my opponents give me so many problems, that I drown in the variations and don't succeed in activating my pieces well enough to deliver any tactical blow. I suggest you, as llama47 did, to study engames, tactics and strategy as much as possible, because you can reach perfectly playable positions even knowing just basic opening principles and some critical lines, to avoid tactical blunders. Good luck!

Unfortunately for us older players, the newer generations call it a Najdorf instead. The Boleslavsky Hole (called Najdorf after the Sicilian variation) and the Wall (King's Indian structure) are different though.

There are some books on Pawn Structures that might help you.

As mentioned, the Kmoch book can be difficult with the mant terms used not being applied in practice today. My pic is a double quart grip.

The Rios book is good, but he used his own naming system for structures (Najdorf type III etc).

Russ Bell's blog had links to those and Soltis' book and the Pawn Structure 101 articles

As mentioned, when your opponent leaves theory...you're on your own. But if you have ideas of what they (and you) should be trying to do, then you might be able to execute your plan faster or stop theirs sooner. It can also lead to giving you opportunities for a different plan, that didn't exist before. You may get these "new ideas" from different structures that are similar.

I also suggest look at some of Silman's articles on this site. He covers some structures that might appear and aren't covered by the mainstream guys.

Having said all that, sometimes the pawn structure is the least important "aspect" of the position.

I think you can build a process by focusing on goals or objectives (Center Control, Development, King Safety, Material, Space, Pawn Structure), by looking at tactics (checks, captures, threats to capture (pressure/tension), and using a candidate moves list to help you decide on moves based on how you prioritize things. You'll make mistakes and need to tweak your process, but eventually it will become the intuition you speak of.

Just my opinion

I was going back to the OP (to answer the original question) and noticed the game you shared. It reminded me of a game I played where I ended up playing the French Defence and didn't even know it until my opponent asked me about it after the game.

You like the "structure" reached, but what if White had played something other than 3.Nf3 like 3.d5? Are you familiar with Benoni structures? Now I guess I should go back and read other posts to see if that's covered.

So back to theory and how much...

Hanging Pawns does a decent job covering opening theory without going too deep. You probably will watch several times (it helps to take notes), but focus on the openings you play and the mainline for now.

Besides the openings, look at some of the middlegame ideas videos.

https://youtube.com/c/HangingPawns

You learn "theory" by either following your favorite player's games to see what kind of openings they play and what style of middlegame positions suit them, or by choosing an opening and going over master level games in them to get an idea of what the typical ideas are. There is no specific number of moves you should 'memorize' or anything, but you should generally know what to do if your opponent plays a move you didn't expect or be familiar with how to convert advantages, etc.

I feel like you want to memorize moves to then ask yourself why these moves are the best rather than "exploring ideas" after a few moves and being left in the dark once again. I tend to prefer to apply chess principles mostly just for optimizing the end game when there's not too many pieces left to debate about the best way to convert. I'm much more interested to memorize theory and only start thinking about chess principles once my opponent got out of the book. If I'm the one getting out of theory first, I feel like I simply don't know what I'm doing well enough. You might think that's insane and that I should only worry about this once I'm X rating, but I really feel like that's not necessarily a bad way to approach chess if I'm rather weak at positional play, but okay at tactics. It helps fix the positional weakness by reducing the chances of having a bad opening phase. I guess I have no choice, but to play chess past the opening, but the chances should be a little higher if I know the opening went fine. 

I mean until you are 1500 , you don't need to take a deep dive into those opening theories. But if you wanna learn it then by all means. 

But, how much do you want to know the lines of your opening repertoire? You say that if you go out of the book, you don't know well what to do, so you cannot know what to do well if your opponents go out of the book either. I don't play against 1000 rated players much, but I doubt that most of them know more than 5 moves (10 plies) of every variation in their opening of choice; so you can memorize up to 5 moves in every line, but beyond that, it is pretty useless. You should understand why those moves, and not others, have been played and which are the typical plans for both colors. About the middlegame, you say that your goal is to use positional principles to "optimize" the endgame; well, that is everyone's goal: to get a good endgame, or to checkmate the opponent even earlier! But I warn you against the possible tendency to try and "jump" to the endgame: in the hope to avoid complications in middlegames, you might develop a bad habit to make concessions, and get a worse endgame, instead. About your tactics, how do you know you are better at it than strategy? I think that puzzle ratings on this site are more inflated than game ratings. If you are about 1500 in puzzles, chanches are you are far lower than that, at tactics, so I don't know if you are really above your opponents, on average. Anyway, if you want to study openings well, try to learn why those lines are played, not just memorize them: that will help your strategic understanding too. Hope that helps.

funny thing is, if i try to do theorhy 90% of the the time my opponent departs from it

Improving Your Chess - Resources for Beginners and Beyond...

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

Hi! My name is Lauren Goodkind and I’m a respected  chess coach and chess YouTuber based in California: 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP5SPSG_sWSYPjqJYMNwL_Q

I slowly learned chess theory by playing and taking lessons from time to time.  My current United States Chess Federation is 1850.  

Learning tactics is key.  I read a tactics book and that helped my rating jump from 1200 to 1500 in two months.  

It's kind of weird because I feel like I need to play opponents in the 1600-2200 range to even try openings because more often than not people leave the book too early in 1500 and under. 

Once I can do that, I need to filter out the lines that leads to a sharp positions and avoid these until I know the theory. It should avoid these equal positions where I actually don't like my position.

I also need to figure out which openings I'm not getting much from and probably cross them out. 1.c3 as White seems like a decent example (Saragossa Opening). It's not an opening that I ever really got a theorical advantage on unlike Caro Kann as Black which starts the same way, but lead to a system that is much more stable for Black. I personally don't like London System and English Opening because they lead to positional games and guess what- I'm not the best at them. 

I do like queen's gambit and 1.d4 openings in general because in my rating range players seems to honestly be more lost than in 1.e4 openings in general. 

I feel like I just need to keep testing openings as rating gets higher and figure out what goes wrong and why. I'm just not too enthusiastic about testing out openings against players just to go like "haha, move 7 was wrong [resign]" followed by checking game analysis, but I guess that's part of the learning process.

I also agree that tactics alone is more than enough to get 1500 rating. I'm just trying to learn how to play against higher opponents than 1500. I also tried computer bots, but it feels like they're more about figuring out weaknesses and taking advantage of how the AI behave rather than playing chess normally. I felt like games against players were vastly different. AI feels like you're playing against a machine and suddenly the machine malfunction for a few moves and you get your chance while players are more consistent in how they make mistakes compared to how sharp they play. 

I guess I'm concluding that I need to get a higher rating to have the opportunity to play against the right players to learn how to play. That's a funny cycle. 

Well, I don't mean to be disrepectful, but there are some contradictions in your statements:

"I need to filter out the lines that leads to a sharp positions and avoid these until I know the theory. It should avoid these equal positions where I actually don't like my position. [...] I personally don't like London System and English Opening because they lead to positional games and guess what- I'm not the best at them".

    But... if you don't like sharp positions and positional ones either, you don't like anything!

"I do like queen's gambit and 1.d4 openings in general because in my rating range players seems to honestly be more lost than in 1.e4 openings in general".

    Yes, usually players in your range prefer 1. e4, both because it leads to positions easier to understand and because 1. d4 can lead to more close, "boring" games. Beginners often like to have fun, first of all, and open games are more suited for that. 1. d4 often leads to positional games, so if you don't like them, because you are not the best at them, you have to study strategy and positional play first.

"I'm just trying to learn how to play against higher opponents than 1500"

    Well, your expected score against players 500 points higher is about 5-8%; it is impossible to significantly raise it, but to play better in general. Even if you play the opening perfectly, they will on average play better moves during the whole game, so they will grind you, not to mention tactical blunders, that you will make more often. If you want to play against higher rated players to go out of your comfort zone, however, in settings you can choose to play against opponents not more than 25 points lower than you, and infinite points higher, so you have many chances to play against stronger players. 

The contradictions have to do with if your goal is to win a game or learn from a game. Depending on what you want, you may want to do the opposite of what I'm suggesting. I should play sharp lines and most likely lose games if I want to practice sharp lines. I should play lines I don't like to get more familiar with patterns I don't like to understand why I feel that way in the first place. It's really a matter of if you want to develop strengths vs if you want to fix weaknesses.

browse...

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

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Ok. Anyway, if you want to just "hop" into the middlegame, against higher rated opponents, you can play daily games: you are allowed to use books and games collections for that, so you can be confident that they will not crush you in the opening.