Studying openings is highly UNDERrated!

I'd have to clarify somewhat as well. Studying tactics definitely is NOT overrated for beginners and those hanging pieces and missing easy kills regularly. 

I do know, however, that my 5-min blitz rating here (I know, a poor surrogate of long-game ability, but that's all I have time for now) was stuck at 1150-1200 no matter how many tactics I solved. Chess literally seemed impossible to improve in, and the 1400s would crush me even before I had a chance to even THINK about a winning tactical shot. 

I can now play 1400s even in 5-min blitz. Yeah, it's still a sucky rating, but it's a lot better than 1150-1200, and the key was absolutely not tactics, but to fill in the gaps of knowledge I had. Openings were a big offender since I'd avoided them, but my lack of ability to play strong endgames is (and continues to be) an equally problematic area. 

I'm not at all lying when I say most of my games now won at the 1350-1450 range of rating rely on tactics that I could absolutely readily see instantly at the 1100 level. As I mentioned before, even NM chessnetwork's victories on youtube rarely rely on some monster tactic, but he still crushes and makes it look darn easy in the process by take care to setup a good position with lots of opportunities and by killing counterplay.

"... Every player memorizes. Grandmasters do it more than anyone else.

GMs spend most of their study time cramming analysis into their long-term memory. They rely on memory when they play their first dozen or so moves of a game. They rely on memory when they play 'exact' endgames. A typical GM has memorized a vast number of moves and key positions at both ends of the game. And this doesn't include the patterns and priyomes he amassed through subconscious memorization.

'Memory is very, very important,' said Roman Dzindzichashvili in a rare admission by a grandmaster. 'Actually it's one of the most important things for success in this game.' ...

... all good opening play is part memory and part understanding. ...

You begin every game by making moves that you remember are good. Inevitably there comes a point when you reach the end of your book knowledge. That's when your memory stops and the understanding is supposed to take over." - GM Andrew Soltis (2010)

Well said ... on all points.

I see virtue in just about all chess study, but no silver bullets anywhere. A lot of it, I think, is just grooving patterns of chess moves and chess positions into your brain.

Tactics study is excellent for building brain muscle for visualizing moves and picking strong ones. I have fallen into the trap Five mentions of seeing tactics that aren't there, but that's a better problem than not seeing tactics much at all.

The point is to notice what's not working and then adjust your play accordingly. If you lose games because you see ghost tactics, you raise your standards before making a tactical move.

This is very odd (and telling) but I think I know how one might try to explain it away.

Nevertheless, it is probably best in such a scenario to take the advice of those who have achieved some measure of success in their field rather than follow the path laid down by those who have achieved basically nothing.

You are welcome to do so.

However, if one studies the history of sports or well, anything, one discovers that the conventional wisdom was often over-rated or flat wrong.

When I was in high school in the late sixties, athletes were encouraged to to tough it out and restrict their intake of fluids during practice. We now know that was a stupid idea.

Then there is the problem that different successful people recommend different things.

Then there is the other problem that most students somewhere along the line notice that what teachers recommend may not work for all students.

Fiveofswords is right that there is no science behind just about all the conventional wisdom for studying chess.

All things being equal, I will take advice from successful people. But I have been very successful at teaching myself in the past, and if I get advice that sounds bogus and has no science behind it, I am happy to put that advice aside. Maybe I'll appreciate it better later; maybe not.

Others may do otherwise.

Right. I agree with this entire post.

I did have a problem with this topic.

I asked for suggestions on what I should do in the opening. People told me to follow chess principles and ignore openings etc.

I did that advice for about 2 or 3 months than I made a decision.

The decision was simply to ignore their advice.

I than began to study openings and my chess improved.

It was because I was getting checkmated alot in the opening part of the game.

It is that simple.

I call a truce,

at least from my point of view, both tactics and openings (with typical moves) are patterns, right?  and as we know knowing chess patterns helps human sees meaning in the complexity of tree of variations that can occur occur in chess.

so, If I memorize my discovered check and you know exactly what to do after you are into the berlin variation of the spanish.

we are more or less equal.

what I think, is that going to extremes is bad.  If I curl up every night with Nunns most complicated tactical puzzles (no idea if there's a book like that) and you try to memorize the MCO- we are probably both wasting time.

I do not think there's as much disagreement as some people think there are.  strong players know more or less what they intend to do, as their opening unfolds... and nobody said all you had to do was obsess on tactics to be a gm.  Your certainly free to play and improve any way you want- its a hobby!  but there's a lot of excellent and succinct advice out there.

most of its consistant.  as ip says. no magic bullets.  make it diverse. openings, endgames, tactics, annotated games and reviewing one's own games. if you don't like some of that its not the end of the world... if you don't like ANY of that, you probably won't improve.

The following article may be of some interest to the people reading this thread:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0026692

Just as an aside, can anybody tell us if there are going to be any more MCOs? It seems to me that the last one was quite awhile ago.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140626165820/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/hansen110.pdf

I study openings by first getting interested in an opening question from my own play or some game I've looked at or article I've read.

Then I'll read summaries about that opening or variation on the web or in various books I have.

Then I'll start tapping through variations in opening explorer software. Then I'll find more detailed discussions.

Then I'll download a stack of GM games and go through a bunch of them quickly. (It's fascinating how often such games don't go like what the opening books tell you.)

Then I'll find annotated games that look important and go through them slowly, sometimes using Guess The Move software.

None of this is passive. I'm always asking questions about what I'm seeing, trying to connect insights to other chess knowledge.

Sometimes I attempt to memorize the first twenty moves or so of an important game, but that's more a general memory/visualization exercise that just happens to be in the opening I'm interested in.

Sometimes I write up a basic tree of lines in pgn that I can come back to later, but I keep it minimal. Otherwise I try to cram everything in and it's useless.

Then of course, I look to play what I've learned online, offline, or Guess The Move. Which leads to more questions and more study.

It's kind of scattershot. I don't remember everything I've covered, but I feel like much of it does get stored away and is to some degree available to me later. Plus it's an enjoyable process.

I feel like I'm learning chess, not just some bare minimum to get me to "a playable middlegame."

Harvey's initial comment was a bit more complimentary. Oh well. 

For those who don't like reading a bunch of statistics, here's the summary:

"Combined with assumptions independently made about the branching factor in master games, we estimate that masters have memorized about 100,000 opening moves. Our results support the hypothesis that monochrestic knowledge is essential for reaching high levels of expertise in chess. They provide a direct, quantitative estimate of the number of opening moves that players have to know to reach master level."

Smyslov: It would have been helpful if you had included that summary in your original post.

I almost never click a link unless I have a good idea of what I'm clicking to and specfically why I might find it interesting.

Few things dont go in destined mail box.

So if a master has memorized 100,000 opening moves and assuming an exponential rate of growth, then an expert might have memorized something like 10,000 moves and an 1800 player 1000 moves.

I'll bet that's in the ballpark.

PossibleOatmeal took a lot of heat yesterday for disagreeing with the Portisch quote:

Your only task in the opening is to reach a playable middlegame.  - Lajos Portisch

It's a nice sentiment and not without its usefulness, but those are surely not the words Fischer or Kasparov lived by when they played balls-to-the-wall chess where they sweated to extract every possible advantage while posing the most severe problems they could to their opponents from move one forward.

I remember Simon Williams or Andrew Martin pointing out that the objective of chess is to checkmate the king, not to reach a favorable endgame -- or a playable middlegame for that matter.

masters have not memorized 100,000 opening moves. It is a little silly to say this.