When to Study Openings?

Seeking opinions:

New players are learning not to drop pieces.  After that I'm told studying/practicing tactics is most important. Also maybe basic endgame knowledge.  At approximately what rating should one begin to study openings and develop a repertoire? Or at what rating is such study necessary for further improvement?

I've never systematically studied openings.  I know general opening principles and from years of playing I've caught on to 5 or 6 moves in many major lines of major openings.  But I'm deciding whether or not to make a serious study of openings. 

Well, at some point you just have to in order to progress.  There is some contingency based on whether your opponents are 'booked up' and nabbing you regularly in tabiyas you're allowing or playing.  Some lines, for better or worse, only have a couple moves that work and those have been determined because every other move has been played.  Some openings have forced draw lines.  Do you know of them, play them, allow them?

You don't strictly have to go full on gonzo must inhale the entirety of an opening -- but you can start by choosing an opening that you're fond of and play regularly and pick up a book on it and try to get better at it.  You sound like you've progressed organically to this point and while you're enjoying the process just add the opening book to the mix now and then and see how it goes.

I think you can study openings whenever you wish. It depends what you mean by 'studying' anyway.

If you want some pointers to know if you need to start now, or if you're already doing maybe a bit too much, have a look there

@chungle:  Thanks for the advice. I'm not yet at the stage where I'm regularly playing opponents that are beating me up in the opening. But it happens sometimes and I think I'll take your advice.

@hicetnunc: Thanks for the link--very relevant thread.

One thing you might want to try is playing through many master games which use an opening you want to learn. I started doing this about two weeks ago, and generally spend 10 minutes on a game of around 30-40 moves, playing through the game quickly a couple of times and then more slowly, trying to understand why a certain move was played and notice when a tactic could be utilised. By doing this with many games you should, in theory, absorb various ideas and patterns subconsciously which should aid your intuition and give you ideas for making plans in such openings.

At the very least, doing this should give you a better understanding of the main ideas of the opening. I'm interested in seeing how beneficial this will be when done over a long period covering hundreds of games.

@Acoustician : it's a very powerful method, provided you're strong enough to sort out and synthetize the information. That's how many pro players do it.

@Acoustician :  good idea; I don't look enough at actual master games. 

I studied openings before everything else. At first Italian, then some variations of Ruy Lopez, then Sicilian, Pirc and afterwards everything else. I had no clue about basic pawn endgames or somethng like that before. However, I believe I managed to go through all this quite well.

@hicetnunc: I wondered if pro players might approach it that way. Currently I am sticking with games from the Romantic era as they are easier to comprehend for a beginner like myself. In the short time I've been doing this I have a noticed a hint of a symbiotic relationship between this form of game study and tactics. Although I couldn't remember any of the games I studied to the point where I could play a game from beginning to end, I would get a flash of recognition during a tactics puzzle as something similar appeared in at least one of the games I studied. Thanks to studying some of Morphy's games (around 50 now), I spot smothered mates far more easily.

It is probably important to start with studying games by pre 20th century masters at first as a beginner, and then as one improves one can move on to games from eras where the style of play became more complex and subtle.

I'm wondering if chess has similarities with language learning when it comes to building pattern recognition. One of the most important things in language learning is exposing oneself to the target language often and in many contexts; first reading simple things and looking things up until you understand everything and then moving on to more difficult content.

Your brain notices and interalises patterns subconsciously which come up across many different contexts (grammatical constructions and words etc.). In my learning of Norwegian, I found my understanding and use of grammar improved far more by just trying to read a lot of native material, basic at first, then more complex later. Grammatical patterns would appear across the many contexts and I would get a feel for how they work until they simply felt natural.

The brain is hardwired to notice patterns, even subconsciously. It's how we learned our native languages after all. That same principle might well be applicable to chess through going over many games and seeing key patterns in many contexts which prompts the brain to make a subconscious note of them, moving onto more complex modern games when the older ones feel more transparent. Doing this alongside solving tactics puzzles, studying strategy, and doing some slow careful analysis of games could make a powerful training method.

I'm wondering if chess has similarities with language learning when it comes to building pattern recognition.

Definitely ! I think you're spot on.

I can't imagine how this could actually have been called "studying" rather than more or less mindless memorization of lines of moves.

It is laughable when folks who barely started to play chess proceed to boldly talk about the "preparation of their opening repertoire", apparently desperately wanting to feel like they're in grandmaster league already by trying to ape high-level players.

All great introductory books are in unison that first you need to study the endgame (power of the pieces, basic mating techniques, ways to convert a material advantage into a win, concepts like opposition, zugzwang, etc.) and the middle-game (convergence and counting, tactics, combinations, positional aspects and strategy, planning, etc.) until you could possibly be ready to understand how all these concepts play together, and as such be ready to really delve into any serious and reasonable study of particular openings.

Still, the neophytes seem to know better anyway. They just know that memorizing a dozen or two opening traps is way more important than being able to mate a lone king with a king and a rook. Just as they simply know better how blitz is supposedly superior to standard time controls in any way, and how physical chess sets are supposedly a clunky and useless relict of the past, as online play via their phones and tablets is way more convenient, and the "modern way to play".

Fischer must have foreseen all this 20 years ago, back when he first started to state that chess was dead.

(...) Fischer must have foreseen all this 20 years ago, back when he first started to state that chess was dead (...)

...but when asked for advice by a friend how to improve at chess, Fischer told him to learn MCO by heart, including the notes...

So maybe all of this isn't as black and white as your chess set...

I never read a chess book and still, I'm a great chess player who can compete with anyone in the world.  Just like golf, I've never had any actual golf lessons, but still I am capable of beating some of the tour players around the world.  Even basketball, I have out played great players in one-on-one basketball simply because of my height.  I've even challenged NBA players in one-on-one situations and it was actually funny to see guys who are "professionals" but 6 inches shorter or more try to penetrate to the basket without the back up support of a usual "big man" 

It does not make sense to try to study an opening in depth if someone's not ready for it. If a beginning player loses the game in an opening, it can practically always be attributed to him having not adhered to basic opening principles (all that beginners need to know about openings in particular), having commited an elementary mistake concerning board vision or counting (having hung a piece or having engaged in an unfavorable exchange), having missed a tactical opportunity on his opponent's part, or any combination of these. Trying to memorize the main lines of the particular opening that happened to have formally been played won't help to alleviate any of the aforementioned issues which more than likely decided about the early loss.

What happens when your opponent is a sadistic maniac who finds ways to exploit regular playbook openings and uses the board as his little playground of horrors?

Hey markgravitygood, it's your Momma!   

If that friend was at least at expert level, this could have made sense. Your example is clearly out of any context, and as such I must admit it sounds rather anegdotical to me.

Regarding the black and white chess set comment, while I realize the phrase having been used more as a figure of speech, I have to note that I neither have nor would ever consider obtaining any chess set that was literally "black and white". These are manufactured by clueless folks who believe that the masses believe that chess sets are to be black and white (all the two-dollar chinese magnetic sets come to mind).

Well, that seems to picture a downward spiral type of situation that surely is at work here as well, i.e. the motto "I must memorize opening lines (and traps!) above all else, because my opponents are likely to memorize opening lines (and traps!) above all else".

I have never been able to attribute any of my losses to not having studied any particular opening in great depth. If I ended up being at a disadvantage withing the first 10 or 15 moves, it could more than likely have been avoided by me paying better attention, adhereing more closely to general development and tactical principles, or possibly playing with a more lax time control.

Before bed, after you brush your teeth!

Also while sitting on the potty.

Depends on your current skill level. Different skill levels need emphasis on different areas.