You don't need an opening reportoire until you hit 2000 ELO - ture or false ?

A little ironic that you claim that my words are not productive, as if it's productive to justify one's argument by saying "I'm using reasoning, observation, and experience," while offering me no ways to know what those consist of. Well, yes, you offered me some books, but I could have already done that with google.

I don't have any weird ulterior motive here. I responded to your argument because I wasn't sufficiently convinced. I gave an alternative explanation for why people are confused about this question. That is why I didn't want to simply assume you were right. It seems like a pretty natural flow of a discussion to me.

I won't tell you who to argue with, although I suggest that a more rational approach on your end is to simply not argue about the issues you don't care about or deem pointless, while arguing about the ones that you think are important, rather than being concerned with who you are arguing with. I don't care if you think the things I'm arguing about right now are pointless -- I would only want you to argue about them if you felt like it.

I do think you make good points which is why I like to talk about them -- it's strange to me that you would take this personally. In reality I feel like I learned a lot from seeing your views, and am happy that we had this discussion. Believe it or not, I think your contributions are quite excellent, and I enjoy reading them and discussing them. I don't have to agree with everything (or technically anything) you say to think so.

Pretty much my philosophy is all about attack the arguer, not the person, if you know what I mean. Ideally it should be possible for two people to completely, utterly disagree on something and still have a ton of respect for each other, and I try rather hard to live up to this ideal.

"Claiming that I "ignored" the interesting part of the question and that I simply said "good methods are good" without offering reasoning, is being dishonest."

I wouldn't say dishonest, although I guess it's easier for me to say since I am aware of my own intentions. But I noticed a lot of claims about good teaching methods, without really saying much about what they actually are, which I felt was the more important thing. Perhaps I just misread. That's always possible. But my post brought up the concern it intended to -- even if it turned out my criticism was wrong, you clarifying things would, well, clear things up :) It's not unlike the scientific method :)

For the majority of people, that's false. 

Yes I wouldn't say absolute zero is something we want. But something pretty brief is in general fine. It's not even the way I approached things, but perhaps I should have (although opening study did make me enjoy chess more, which can be an important factor). Even now, with my 1 d4 openings, I literally just look for plans that are logical -- maybe f3 and e4 makes sense in some positions, maybe I should avoid exchanges here, etc etc, just use ideas I've vaguely seen before combined with my own judgment, and most of the time I come out with an advantage anyway, and I am never in trouble early on. White's position is just too rock solid :) That's for white of course, but still it says a lot I think.

Basically how I learn openings these days is I literally just try out a plan, in a serious game, that makes sense to me, and evaluate it retrospectively, based on what happened in the game. It gives me an intimate grasp of its pros and cons, and I learn plenty about the opening that way, more than I need. In fact it's so labor non-intensive I find it kind of beautiful.

You know, the ultimate irony here is that, while I have been criticized for "overcomplicating things," the process I just laid out in the second paragraph of my previous post is so simple it's almost obnoxious.

If you want to get better at chess you should play openings that give your advantage away as white. It will help you succeed in the long run because you will have experience on how to improve equal positions into winning positions. I lost hundreds of rating points with this approach but I know you won't!

Yeah but don't rely on gimmicks too much.  White has no advantage in the Nimzo-Larsen but it's still worth playing once in a while because you're more likely to be familiar with those kinds of positions and strategies.  Same with the King's Gambit.  White has no advantage there (and needs to be booked up to avoid a slight disadvantage!) but can be alright if you're familiar with the positional nuances, endgames, and strategies.  Though black has quite a bit of leeway between 3...Be7 3...d5 3...d6 3...g5 and other lines and white must be prepared to meet all of them.  That's also assuming the opponent will play 1...e5 too. 

Against the Sicilian 2.a3 equalizes but white should know it better since it's so rare.  The new Tigran Petrosian plays it. 

The Kings Gambit is too crazy and tactical to even be considered in the conversation of advantage disadvantage. If you go into the Muzio Gambit or one of those  crazy lines, you can be theoretically up 2 pawns but if you get checkmated or lose your queen due to sharpness, it doesn't really matter. Those positions are VERY hard to play for black.

are you all

beating a dead horse

No, we ate it already. We are saving our cash cow....

i heard in france that they eat horse burgers.

is that true?

you can have your cash cow.

i would rather have a goose that lays golden eggs

ELO - ture or false ?

Did you mean to say "turd" ?

It's interesting that the majority here believes in the importance of opening theory knowledge.

In the last days i tested 1.e4 in blitz-games (my knowledge of the spanish is maybe 3-4 lines and the first 5 moves in the main line) - yet the results were not that diffrent compared to playing 1.b3 which i play for years.

How comes ? Or is 1.b3 such a bad opening that knowing it does not give a substantial advantage ?

Or maybe this only works in blitz and will fail in longterm-control ... but not knowing opening theory only means calculating from the first moves - and usually the piece contact at the beginning of the games isn't that intese, so this shouldn't be that big of a problem.

Ending in a bad position ? Happens to me in 1.b3 anyways from time to time :)  And when following the basic opening principles (fast development, keeping the position healthy and solid, controling the center) the position after completing development isn't that bad usually. Maybe there's no advantage like from certain lines of the ruy lopez, but it's usually a playable position.

What lacks though, is the pattern recognition. In 1.b3 i "feel" at home and can't be surprised that fast.Having a fixed repertoire means getting similar positions quite often. This leads to a feeling for that position, knowing it's dangers and chances. WIth time one plays from memory, does not have to invent ideas all the time. Maybe that's the advantage ?

Yeah, because there's no middle ground between Elubas and "Play the Hippo or Modern defense with both colours".

This thread is proof that Polgar is right.  You spend too much time on openings.  Not just studying them, but debating whether or not you should study them.  

There is far too much rubbish about how openings are essentially unimportant.

I hear "truisms" all the time that are cheesy at best. Not only about chess but in religions and politics.

Are there no critical thinkers to be found?

Well, I know there are. Unfortuneately, damn few. Most people are on auto pilot.

You can get away with unsound things far more in blitz. It is when it is correspondence or OTB that you have to pretty much play sound if not precise openings to be successful.

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Stop spamming . Mod

Which makes it all the more surprising that the "non-obfuscators" are indeed unable to extract the main point of the rhetoric?

You're just too lazy to actually find points so instead you need everything spoonfed to you -- anything that would take more than a few seconds to read is too much for you to remember. Perhaps chess is not for you? :)