Survey : Correlating Limited Opening Knowledge with Federation Rating

After reading a lot of forum threads that request opening advice for people who seem to think that's the only roadblock to their progress => I've decided to collect statistics => Would require the help of any Federation-rated player =>

How far did you progress in your Federation (provide rating range) (USCF, BCF, ELO/FIDE etc.) before you actually needed to work on your openings?

By work I mean do more than skim through some lines from the MCO, look at a few traps or just retain a vague idea of where your pieces go and what kind of positions you tend to end up with. :)

To start the ball rolling => Me => 1600 USCF

I've never done extensive study of any of the known openings.  I have no clue what the names are of the openings I play, I just know that they work in blitz.  The problem is I don't have a Federation rating to help you out in your comparisons, but I'd say I'd probably be around 2500 FIDE in real life give or take. Of course don't write that down for your study because I'm just estimating.  It would probably be higher actually.

I guess I would say 1400 USCF. Learning the thematic ideas behind say the french have really matured my understanding of the game. If you mean by memorization of the moves, not just the ideas, then I'll say 1550 USCF in more complex openings.

I always loved openings even before I became over 1000.  So I can't really answer that question.

 2500 or 1500?

 I'm sorry but that's virtually impossible. No one can have a rating anywhere   near GM level and not actually know what their rating is.

Did you mean 1500? (I'm not sure you can be 1500 FIDE just USCF but anyway...)

 I was enthralled with openings and studied them before my first tournament. Mostly a waste of time and effort but I'm still a big opening preparer.

Thanks for the responses so far .... Don't forget to report back what rating range you were in before you started to invest time in actual opening preparation?

Yup I meant 2500 but I was just venturing a guess and I told the OP not to include that info in his study.  All I have to go on is the fact that I almost never lose and my high  success rate playing against masters at ICC in just about all time controls.  Of course I'll have to get an official real-life rating for it to mean much and I know that.  My point was that I've never had any use for learning openings and still don't know any of them after say a couple moves.  I just play from instinct and often win.

While WildFireMayhem is completely right about at picking a number that suggests consistent Master-beating (no pun intended) potential, given that he's not played a Federation-rated tournament his claims cannot be used as data for my survey question.

Additionally => Playing online and scalping Masters is fine but so's the guy who hustles Masters at chess in the parks. Trouble is ... they won't really get too much "street cred" from people who suffer through the trials and tribulations of actually earning a rating by playing rated tournaments OTB.

What I do like is that he de-emphasizes opening knowledge as a requirement to be as good as he claims he is.  This is precisely one of the claims that intend to get tested via this survey :)

never really studied opening to well. when i first started playing i got to about 900-1000 without studying any opening (USCF) right now i think im low 1200's or high 1100's. I feel like i should be at the very least 1300 probably 1400 if i stopped making stupid errors. I have gotten close to beating a 1400 missed a tactic, and beaten 1 or two 1300's and a 1900 three times in about 30 to fifty fun games. I would say study middlegame.

my ICU rating at last tournament was 1462ICU which i think is approx 1562 Fide, and ive never done too much extensive opening learning. Besides learning the basics of a few openings but after about 5 moves or so, im playing on my own really, with maybe an idea/plan from somewhere. But ive been playing for 8 years and have played atleast 150 rated games so id have a bit of experience.

USCF 1545P9 just started working on my first opening book.  But I always go through my blitz games in the db to look at the lines afterword while doing quick analysis.

Thanks Shachgeek but I'd die of boredom playing an engine.  I don't even do post-game analysis with them because it's boring.  Similarly I don't look at chess databases during before or after turn-based correspondence games, they make chess boring. 

I'm only interested in playing people. 

Playing an engine is underrated. It's interesting, because they can win on tactics alone and it's good training. But don't expect your instinct to work on them.

This is precisely the answer naysayers to your "skill at taking down 2500-level people" are expecting.  I'd hate to break it to you, but there's a fine line about bragging about one's skill (which I'm sure you're not) and stating that you  eat Masters for breakfast without backing it up with evidence.

Engines are good training. They're just frustrating to play against because they will not blunder and punish any tactical errors, and are extremely resilient. Even GM's can make careless mistakes against a computer that can blow their position apart or lose the initiative. A computer would never do that, though, although they can make positional mistakes of course but they're too hard to punish. I bet frustration is the reason why you wouldn't want to play a CPU, which makes it boring. But if you're 2500, you should have the patience to at least draw consistently.

I can't really answer this -- when I was 12, we got a chess-playing program on our IBM PC XT, and I systematically found out and wrote down it's entire opening book, and picked a repertoire from it. I didn't even really start playing chess until three years later. I've always known more about openings than my peers.

What's much more interesting (to me) is the percentage of people that reach, say 2200 FIDE that never studied studying opening theory deeply. I think it's a lot of them. People who start on opening theory below the 2000s tend to plateau.

Edit: asking when people started studying openings is bound to lead to a red herring answer, since it's known that people generally start concentrating on openings far too early.

Thanks Scarblac. It is my point as well that it is "far too early" to hit the opening books for most people ... but as you alluded to => what is the metric to decide when it becomes "necessary?" That's still the open question.

Thanks Shivsky.  No really I'm totally bragging about my skill.  When I say I wipe the floor with masters I meant I beat them more often than not.  Both in blitz and in standard time controls on the internet.  By master I meant FM's and I'M's. I absolutely own a lot of them.  I've played GM's and have won some, but have lost a lot too.  The GM games were mostly blitz, and to be honest I'm really not great a blitz.  Also, Super GM's have wiped the floor with me.  I'm not a chess god, but I have a lot of confidence in my ability.