Serious request for suggestions to reach 2000

Tell me you do not know what you are talking about without telling me you do not know what you are talking about.

Especially when someone creates their account and selects 1800 as their first rating.

There is a kid in his 20s that came to the local club ~3 months ago.  He decided he wanted to play OTB.  He was talking with the TD and showed him his chess.com ratings.  2450 in blitz, 2375 in rapid, 2300 in bullet.  Starts his first rated game in the lower section against a 900-rated 11-year-old.  The game was over in 22 moves with the 11-year-old having a crushing position from move 6.

It is always the same:  someone with a fairly new account comes on claiming they have violated the rules of nature and achieved great results.  Until you look deeper and see they are only really good at data entry.

I hate to break it to you, but if you actually read the post, you would see that is exactly what I did.  It is okay, I realize reading comprehension is hard for your generation.

Oh, I'm quite sure she is.  I'm also quite sure she got there by studying openings and not understanding any tactics or strategy in a game that revolves around tactics and strategy.  Yep, definitely happened.

The French defense guy is @thrillerfan =)

Yeah he’s a good guy.

He always makes me laugh and has some point to make lol

“You know it’s thriller, thriller night”

@thrillerfan

Studying openings for beginners is helpful yes, as helpful as watching paint dry... I guess studying openings might increase their reading speed a bit so it is indeed helpful in that area but I would suggest reading a novel for that and not a boring chess book

LTR - Lifetime Repertoire.  These are opening courses on Chessable.  Many of which focus on rote memorization.

You are studying the middlegame in relation to the opening you play.  If you read something like "Chess Structures:  A Grandmaster Guide" by Mauricio Flores Rios, he will give you a pawn structure and discuss the plans for both sides.  He will even mention what openings reach a given structure most often.  No one would consider that "opening study".  That is the kind of "opening study" class-level players should be spending most of their "opening study" time on, rather than trying to memorize moves.

There is some disagreement with trainers on this matter.  Some trainers like to have beginners play gambits to get them comfortable using the initiative.  Most gambits, however, result in either a quick win, or a long painful loss.  In my experience, this works well with kids as they have plenty of time to experiment and play around with things, but does not work well with adults.

For adults, I recommend choosing their openings by using the players then enjoy watching (and by that, I mean players in the top 100).  If you like watching MVL play the Najdorf, play that.  If you like watching Magnus play the Sveshnikov, play that, etc.  The reason is simple:  you are much more likely to review master-level games if you enjoy them, which will allow you to pick up on strong ideas.  Additionally, players in the top 100 do not play objectively bad stuff, so you won't have to change your repertoire in 2 years when your opponents are strong enough to crush dubious nonsense.

So, in a sense, I agree (especially for adult learners) in playing "good" openings, but where we diverge is in the method and amount of time dedicated to studying them.

For example, when I was learning the Ruy Lopez, I had a "move by move" book on it where almost every other move was annotated by the author in all the major lines.  I played through the book on a real board looking at the ideas for both sides.  It took about 2-hours a day for a week to get through the whole book.  That was years ago, and even today I still have no problems when running into 2... Nc6 and yet the only time I have to look at an opening book is for the 2 minutes when analyzing a game to see where I deviated from theory.

The issue is not "you should never look at openings", but how and how much.

If everything is important, nothing is.

You do not have an infinite amount of time, and most certainly do not have an infinite amount of time to dedicate to chess study.  Thus, if you are looking to improve, you must optimize how you spend your study time (if your goal is not improvement, then do whatever you like).  In anything in life, not just chess, the optimal path to improvement is to 1) identify your biggest weaknesses, 2) work to make those weaknesses into strengths, 3) reassess, 4) repeat.  Spending too much time on opening study does limit development simply because the opening is almost guaranteed to not be the biggest problem for 99.9% of players.  Time you are spending on it, is time you could have been spending working on areas that are your biggest weaknesses.  When you spend a significant amount of time there, it is like eating candy instead of healthy food:  you feel like you ate something, but none of it is useful for your body.

The only time I did that was when I was responding to @IronSteam1, and I was literally responding to the whole post (including his quote).

I'll bite:  how exactly did you "study openings" as a beginner?  And when was this?

Not at all.  It reflects your performance against the pool.  There are players (one even in this thread) who are ~1700-1800 USCF with ~2400 chess.com online rapid ratings.  I know NMs who have 2300 chess.com online rapid ratings.  In a 100-game match, those NMs would win at least 75 games, and likely lose less than 10 to those class players, yet the class players have higher online ratings.  So, trying to justify your "understanding" using your online rapid rating is laughable.

I concur.  But it is a bit of fun to toy with the trolls from time to time.

The point apparently flew over your head.  It isn't "Oh, Magnus played this, so it must be good, I'll play that!"  It is, "I enjoy studying Magnus's games, so I'm going to play those lines because I'm looking at them already, and since Magnus is playing them in serious games, they must be decent".

The irony about your diatribe about context is you follow it up by 1) missing the context, 2) removing the context, and 3) creating a strawman to shoot down.

I must have missed when you stated you were a top 30 player ...

And you didn't answer either question.

I know someone who is 2900 in bullet and 2300 rapid, but is about 100 points lower than me in otb. The correlation is there, but only when comparing to yourself.

Hey, its my birthday and I'll bonk the trolls if I want to

I think HansGiving is a recurring member, actually. Always closes account after a week or two and makes a new one, around 1100-1300 rating, and has some sort of pun in the username.

You still haven't answered the questions ....

If I said I side with pawntsunami, would you have to beat my rating too?

Ok so to conclude this thread, we can agree that opening study is the most useless thing a beginner or an intermediate player can do. Just work on visualization, look ahead and tactics and you will be 2000 easy