If you aren't a GM, having a slight advantage out of the opening is insignificant.

Opening study isn't required - but it sure can be helpful, if done properly.

Chess gets much easier once you learn the basic ideas of your openings and defenses.

I feel like the OP is a troll in the style of de la Maza guys, where he's not just talking about making irregular openings but disregarding chess principles altogether and winning on tactics. 

Obviously you can do stupid things and get away with them in some games.  

A good proof of how opening advantage matters is how white always tends to win more than black at almost every rating - naturally, the higher the rating the more it matters. 

You will never become a good player if you don't study openings and it will hugely limit your progress the longer you choose to do so.  

"TED talk" my foot. 

Nice essay.

It depends if you have the skill to turn an opening, positional advantage into a material advantage, which is 100x easier to convert.

White had a huge advantage out of the opening and should have won easily, the fact of the opponent messing up is pathetic to try to prove that it doesn't matter, which is why I am thinking this thread is some sort of joke. 

It's like giving away a penalty in football - yes you could still win, but it makes it a lot harder.  

I don't think we're actually in disagreement here, I agree with everything you just said.

To be honest, I feel like the title was worded pretty poorly. I don't think that having an advantage at any point in the game is insignificant.

My main point was that having a slight advantage out of the opening is very rarely going to be the main "deciding factor" between a win and a loss. And this is especially true at lower ratings.

This isn't the greatest example, but off the top of my hungover brain it's the only one I can really come up with. As white, I've played 1.Na3 53 times with a win percentage of 81% (Bizarrely it has the highest win percentage of all of my first moves. By a lot.)

Out of all of those games, I can probably count on 2 hands the amount of times I entered the middlegame with any sort of advantage.

I wasn't trying to minimize the importance of the opening at all. Obviously all 3 phases of the game are equally important, albeit for different reasons. However, out of the 3 phases of the game, the opening is clearly the most forgiving and I don't think that's even debatable.

It's (almost) always going to be easier to recover from an opening blunder than it would be from a tactical blunder in the middlegame.

I'm not really sure why I posted it, if I'm being honest. All I can say with any certainty is that I was fairly drunk, (If you look at the game I linked in the original post Its pretty obvious that I wasn't playing "normal" lol) and when I'm drunk, I say and do a lot of weird things.

After rereading the post while sober, I think it was just my drunken and verbose way of saying, "Tactics, tactics, tactics". With a good bit of drunk, off-topic rambling sprinkled in.

May edit the post and add a Tl;Dr.

Wasn't making excuses, literally acknowledged in the original post that I lost due to poor time management (And yes, playing the opening about as bad as I could lol).

If you read the original post in it's entirety and your only takeaway is that I was trying to make excuses for losing one game, then you have completely missed the point of the post.

The post isn't about the game, the game is included to illustrate the point I was making in the post. Maybe give it another shot.

I used to get steamrolled in openings and lose in the first 15 moves before I studied them. Seems pretty worth it to me, I no longer lose instantly in the sicilian / KID

To prepare an opening sufficiently, you must also be sure to be well-versed in the middle-games and endgames following. This is the incorrect judgement in which many lower-rated players use as presupposition to proving that they "should have won", to which they do not consider that although are objectively winning in conjunction to the engine it is not realistic to be able to convert anything +2 - +3 without a few hiccups. I have reached +12 positions against 2100 -2200 USCF players but have not been able to convert successfully (my biggest hurdle is overcoming choice overload) and traded into barely winning endgames that I have not been able to convert (even losing at times). If your play does not exceed opening preparation it will do little help to improve your chess. If you have a genuine understanding of the positions in which you goad your opponent to enter, perhaps you can improve your perceived skill as to your overall.

Don't know who De La Maza is, and I certainly wasn't expecting to be called a troll for posting this, considering it's direct relevance to a topic that frequently gets discussed here.

As I said in one of my other posts in the thread, I was just drunk and messing around in a way that don't fully know how to explain, but I'm going to do my best to attempt it.

Disclaimer: This probably won't make any sense at all. And by not being able to eloquently describe it, i may just end up making myself sound like I have schizophrenia 😂

Okay. So sometimes whenever I play unrated games on that other chess site, I end up getting matched against people who play the whole game in a way that they aren't trying to win at all. What I mean by that is that instead of making good chess moves, they just shuffle their pieces around into weirdly aesthetically pleasing positions (like making weird shapes, or having all of their pieces aligned symmetrically in a way that's just neat to look at, even played one guy who set his pieces into the shape of a face, which I thought was really cool.)

So alot of the time, on that site, when I'm playing unrated, I do something similar where I'll play the first 6-10 moves or so just doing chess art (not sure if it's an actual term but it's a pretty decent way to describe what I'm talking about) and then after getting my pieces into odd positions that I just think are "neat" to look at, I'll play the rest of the game out as normal.

You see, long before I was the schizophrenic chess artist that I moonlight as today, I was (and still am) an avid chess player. Have been since I was about 9 years old (just for reference, I'm now 28).

This isn't a case of me trying to diminish the importance of openings at all, I've spent far too much time and money on chess books to have any interest in doing that. I even said in my original post that my fascination with openings is a huge part of the reason I fell in love with the game in the first place.

but apparently I was drunk enough last night to make an exception. I joined a rated game and did as I usually do in the unrated pool, I made my first 6-10 (I have no idea how many) moves just shuffling my pieces in ways that I thought looked neat and then played the rest of the game as normal, that's all this was. It's certainly not how I usually play, because if it was, my rating almost certainly would have never surpassed 2000.

Tl;Dr I'm not a troll, just a drunk idiot. My username is literally "The Wine-O", for gods sake.

P.S. Even if you learn absolutely nothing from this post (which is quite likely, considering there isn't anything in it that's worth learning). That still makes it equally as informative as most of the TED talks I've seen.

Thank you 😁

I tend to ramble way too much (Hard to believe, I know.) It's actually one of the main reasons I don't post in the forums.

I would like to formally apologize to everyone I've subjected to it. I'll crawl back into my hole now.

Definitely expected a few responses like this, in fact I called it.

From the original post:

"I'm sure there's going to be somebody that looks at this and says something along the lines of, "Yeah but you wouldn't have gotten the advantage back if your opponent hadn't made a few of those massive blunders!"

And yes, you're not wrong. If my opponent hadn't blundered away his advantage, I most certainly wouldn't have gotten it back."

That's how the game works 😁

“the fact of the opponent messing up is pathetic”

*the fact that the opponent messed up shows that they are only human that cannot convert an opening advantage like a gm can

While I agree with your title, in the game you posted, white did not have "a slight advantage" out of the opening.

Personally, my openings are what I depend on the most. If I have a bad opening and I’m down a pawn & a knight, it’s going to be pretty significant.

In a way, that strengthens the point I was making.

But I am absolutely baffled that the thread got 3 and a half pages deep before someone finally pointed it out 😂

It both strengthens and weakens the point. 

Because although people lose due to blunders - that's like an "oh, duh!" moment. Everyone loses because they blundered. But it's like saying that the kid got sent to the hospital because he was electrocuted, and not because he was doing a tiktok challenge of sticking pennies into the wall outlets (which is the real reason).

So this sort of exaggeration doesn't quite hit right. 

I Agree with your title, though, since I play the czech benoni. I play worse openings because I'm a lazy person, and I need to be in danger to force myself to play good moves. Maybe that's not a good sign of myself as a person, but it works fine for me in chess at least. I won't be a grandmaster walking around with this mentality, but I'm not bad at chess either. So maybe it works. Depends on the person.

As someone who plays alot of gambits. This is probably the most relatable thing I've ever read in the forums.

Especially the second sentence lol

What about for IMs?

The title wasn't to be taken literally, it was just something to grab people's attention.