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

Oh, you mean you recognized the necessity of sound opening play... lol

In response to this:

dodgernation wrote:

The opening serves one purpose, to get to a playable middlegame. 

"A mistake in the opening you can survice."  A mistake in the middle game will hurt you.  A mistake in the endgame will kill you. 

If youre getting beat in the opening, youre missing tactics.

*Take note of the above opening, in the analysis provided, how detrimental one bad move is for white, having a 8.55 pawn deficit to overcome. If as you say that this one bad move shouldn't matter, I challenge you to take a rook and bishop or knight off of the board before you start and lets see how many games you would win. I bet it isn't many.

ChessAnalyse 2.6 Analysis Report

Engine                   Houdini 4 Pro x64
Time analysed sec        999999999
Depth analysed plies     17
Hash kB                  5120
MultiPV                  5
Forward Analysis

|Top 1 |Top 2 |Top 3 |Top 4 |Top 5 |

|      2 |      2 |       1 |       0 |        0|

|Top 1 % |Top 2 % |Top 3 % |Top 4 % |Top 5 %

|     28.6 |     57.1 |     71.4 |    71.4 |   71.4

-------------------- Game 1 --------------------
[Result "*"]

1. e4 {B; 1; e4 0.13 5 17; d4 0.09 5 17; c4 -0.01 5 17; c3 -0.05 5 17; Nf3 -0.07 5 17}
e5 {B}
2. Nf3 {B; 1; Nf3 0.11 4 17; d4 0.11 4 17; Qh5 0.06 4 17; Bc4 0.02 4 17; Qf3 0.02 4 17}
Nc6 {B}
3. Bc4 {B; 2; Bb5 0.19 8 17; Bc4 0.17 8 17; h3 0.08 8 17; Nc3 0.00 8 17; c3 -0.02 8 17}
Nd4
4. Nxe5 {0; Nxd4 0.37 6 17; d3 0.21 6 17; a4 0.20 6 17; h3 0.17 6 17; O-O 0.16 6 17; Nxe5 -0.10 7 18}
Qg5
*5. Nxf7 {0; Bxf7+ -0.43 10 17; O-O -1.72 10 17; d3 -2.18 10 17; Be2 -2.58 10 17; Ng4 -2.59 10 17; Nxf7 -8.55 66 18}
Qxg2
6. Rf1 {3; Ng5 -8.70 10 17; d3 -8.89 10 17; Rf1 -10.17 10 17; Rg1 -11.00 10 17; Nc3 -11.99 10 17}
Qxe4+
7. Be2 {2; Qe2 -10.17 0 17; Be2 M-1 0 17}
Nf3# 8. * *

Take note only two bad moves are made in the opening and if you aren't making it a point to learn how openings have to be played and you make one detrimental mistake, giving you opponent a decisive advantage, the likelihood you can suddenly play Houdini's best move until you get caught up, isn't likely. In fact, I am banking on you making another mistake soon in the opening and most likely losing fast.

However, if you do open soundly, get your pieces mobilized and coordinated and you drop a queen, you may recover from it.

I have seen some ridiculous claims in this thread , I guess I will just have to consider the source(s) . 

Personally telling people not to study openings before a certain level seems to irk me the most about certain players. The opening is an important phase of the game just like the endgame and middlegame, you should study all if you want to understand the game well.

I certainly studied openings long before I got to 2000 and had an opening repertoire before I was an A class player . The key is to not neglect any phase of the game and to spend the most time on the phase that you are weakest in . 

im weak in all aspects of the game hence why in the last year and a half i haven't been able to make any progress in my chess and still hover around 1590-1720 OTB , jumping around that rating range with no real improvement.

I studied some opening theory this morning while riding a subway train to my manicure appointment

Runaway train never coming back
Wrong way on a one way track
Seems like I should be getting somewhere
Somehow I am neither here nor there

There just aren't many situations I can think of where knowing how to think about chess in general wouldn't get you out of just about any chess problem at the class level, given that every game is quite littered with opportunities. Again some may counter "well class players don't know enough about chess so they need opening theory as a crutch." But this is misguided, since I am not talking about whether a class player knows some particular thing or not; I'm talking about what parts of their game a class player should strive to improve. Indeed I'm saying it's more efficient, in general, to improve a part of the game that is applicable to a wide variety of positions, rather than just a specific set of them.

By the way I want to note that enjoyment is a perfectly good reason to study the opening! From a pure improvement standpoint, I would say a very general, brief, even vague, overview of what you're trying to do, plus whatever you pick up in your own games, is probably as much as you should do. Beyond that, whatever you get from openings you would get more so from becoming a better player. Any problem you face I would be inclined to blame your lack of skill for, not the opening. The sad thing is, chess is so hard that you're going to be confused no matter what you do. You just have to make do with this inevitability and try to improve as much as you can; there is no magic solution to this problem.

The funny thing is openings made up a huge part of my studies for a long time, maybe up to 1800 even. Naturally it had to help me in some respects, but if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't take my path at all. The only thing I was able to do with this study is find openings that suited my style, but a detailed knowledge of the opening is redundant for that purpose -- a brief understanding would have served just as well.

+1

This is true not only in chess, but for learning in general. Approach things as a whole -- and the quickest, most efficient gains are usually from spending time in the weakest area.

This is why some people reached 2000 with little to no opening study, and some people studied opening a lot before reaching 2000.

In general I would agree -- in fact this kind of philosophy is something I live for, but it also depends on how important the "weak area" is. I could be extremely bad at mating with queen and king vs king and rook, but since that will probably never occur in my games I don't necessarily need to work on it.

Wow, that person looks a lot like rowsweep.

Oh, did I accidently post that here. I meant to post that in how to find pics from the net and make them look like your own...

Elubas wrote:

• Elubas wrote:

  By the way I want to note that enjoyment is a perfectly good reason to study the opening! From a pure improvement standpoint, I would say a very general, brief, even vague, overview of what you're trying to do, plus whatever you pick up in your own games, is probably as much as you should do. Beyond that, whatever you get from openings you would get more so from becoming a better player. Any problem you face I would be inclined to blame your lack of skill for, not the opening. The sad thing is, chess is so hard that you're going to be confused no matter what you do. You just have to make do with this inevitability and try to improve as much as you can; there is no magic solution to this problem.

You are briliant! I love reading your comments, it is refleshing from strong player how you share your knowledge. May I ask how high your otb rating was? Mine was at 2110 uscf and now at 2011 uscf. 

Thanks. I am a bit over 2050 USCF at this point, and still consider myself to be an improving player.

Opening is important, what distinguish strong player from a duffer is the opening. If I did not give some time as a low rated player and played junk opening I would still be low rated; I seen players from my two chess clubs I  play and players who play junk opening or avoid playing 1.e4 and standard lines ( Colle, London System, King's Indian Attack, Reti and finally English.) stay low rated, if are below 1800 elo you need to play 1.e4 so you can develop to become a better player; the reason 1.e4 is important is you get tactical positions and positional positions and others different pawn structures and different way to handle center breaks, for insteads the French opening, Sicilian, Petrov and Ruy Lopez ; each of these opening require specific planning to reach a desire goal, and that is a opening advantage. Your opening needs to be sound enough to play against Master.

What about about a middle ground approach? I actually gained a lot by learning some structures: Symmetrical English, Carlsbad, Kings Indian Attack, black side of classical Ruy Lopez (i.e. some patterns revolving naround black King). At the same time, learning long move sequences has almost always been an utter waste of time for me. Basically, if You learn plans, then You win in the long run, as You start to think along the lines "this position resembles me something", "if opponent blocks the center then I go into pawn storm mode on the kingside" etc. Knowing long lines may actually hurt this kind of thinking.

Reti, Kings Indian Attack, the English and even 1.b3 are actually great openings to play if one wants to learn new things about chess. The problem of weak players is not that they play something inappropriate - but rather that they don't understand that this stuff must be played with as much energy as 1.e4 lines. Open games or the Sicilian get you into action-reaction mode, so you become naturally active. But starting with 1,Nf3 and then generating the same kind of pressure is a different level of fun altogether.