I've lost countless games by blindly following opening systems. Sometimes my subconscious just wants chess to be easy, but chess isn't like a musical instrument where you can play well with little thought, it's a thinking game. Once I was playing black in the french and did the autopilot thing, and the next thing you know my queen was staring at an absolute pin.
Probably best to put thought into all moves, right from the start.
That was the big eye-opener for me when I started playing OTB. Moves that you commonly see played online (especially at lower levels) are not played OTB, so when you play on auto-pilot you get into trouble quickly. One of my first games was against a 1700 where I blundered a knight in the opening because I was playing on autopilot and he was not (of course, I was also playing a G/65 as if it were G/5, but that is another story).
lol I call that a blitz hangover.
I think on every move. When you play on autopilot, you run the risk of falling on your face (hard lesson learned when I got beat by someone in a positionally won game and stopped paying attention).
I've lost countless games by blindly following opening systems. Sometimes my subconscious just wants chess to be easy, but chess isn't like a musical instrument where you can play well with little thought, it's a thinking game. Once I was playing black in the french and did the autopilot thing, and the next thing you know my queen was staring at an absolute pin.
Probably best to put thought into all moves, right from the start.