What opening should I play? (Part 1)

Why am I doing this blog?

It feels a bit bad to read genuine legit questions regarding openings everyday in forum without answering it. But usually there is no simple answer. It is often like "I am ill, what is the right treatment for me?". Well: a stomach problem usually needs a different treatment than a back pain! The main questions centre around

• how to choose the "right" opening (for instance for a player rated 1800)
• how to "learn" an opening

I am trying to address these questions and to provide useful hints to make an informed opening choice without outside assistance.

What am I not doing here?

I am not recommending specific openings. And I am neither recommending nor providing opening repertoires:

1. I don't want to spam: there are loads of recommendations and ready-to-eat repertoires - commercially or freely available - on different platforms as well as in form of books.
2. I don't want to be blamed. Make the decision yourself and take full responsibility for it!
3. It was never my cup of tea.

I am in no way advocating against the usage of external repertoires. It just does not work for myself:

• I enjoyed chess always as an area in my life, where I can make decisions entirely on my own without having to fulfil external expectations (as for instance in school). This is maybe the main reason, why I never asked anybody for opening advice. Also I never had a coach, who gave me such an advice without being asked.
• Repertoires are usually rather narrow: The author offers usually one option (occasionally two) in a certain position: if you don't like it, that's bad luck. And there are seldom detailed explanations. Even if I like the move, there are sometimes two or three attractive perfectly playable alternatives. If the only reason for the choice of a move is the recommendation of the author, then I will forget that move quickly.
• Many years ago I borrowed a "kings indian bible" from a teammate in my chess club, a very thick book by GM Bologan. The author recommended against the Sämisch variation a tried and trusted pawn sacrifice. I looked at some games and thought: "Uh, that will take a long time to understand that, also it feels difficult to play for a win there with Black." Also I never had the intention to play the Kings Indian all the time, I just wanted to add a more aggressive option against 1.d4 and become less predictable (at that time I played more or less exclusively 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 with Black). Instead I looked in the database and I found a game of GM David Bronstein, who played 5...Nfd7 once. Actually this helped me many years later to dodge a preparation against the Grünfeld Defence.
  https://lichess.org/study/ffNbX1oj/KOoDpUx1

Tools

• For starters the Lichess opening explorer is more than enough! Often after a Lichess game I use that to examine, how others have played.
• On my local computer I use the free chess database program SCID, as described here: https://lichess.org/forum/general-chess-discussion/chess-database-4?page=3#26

How much is enough?

One question is seldom asked: "How much time should I devote myself to openings compared to other areas like tactics, endgames and general chess understanding?" This is also a matter of taste, but in order to develop and improve it makes a lot of sense to find the right balance.

Personally I am currently refusing to memorize concrete lines and trying to play the opening according to general chess understanding. Basically that's what Chess960 (aka Fischer Random Chess) is about. Generally I consider the risk of spending too much time on openings as higher than the other way round. If you struggle in the opening, you will register that, if you analyze your games. But you can easily get lost in subtleties of openings at the cost of for instance your tactical alertness.

Of course a "no-memorize" approach has limits especially at the highest level. Opening preparation obviously costs top players a lot of time.

How is this blog structured?

To make it easier to digest, I am dividing the topic in different parts:

• First I show a concrete example from my own practice.
• Then I'll define different criteria, according to which you can evaluate the usefulness of an opening for yourself. This should also illustrate, why there are no simple universal answers both to the "which opening?"-question as well as to the "how to learn"-question.
• I'll use these criteria to comment on different openings.

Practical example

Some years ago I had to play a tournament game against a player of my strength, who mainly played the Budapest Gambit (1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e5 3.dxe5 Ng4) with Black. This opening is rarely played in classical games, therefore I did not have a specific preparation against it. In earlier rapid or blitz games I usually played rather modestly with Nf3 and e3. I started my preparation the day before and after a database research I quickly realized, that it would be impossible for me to prepare reasonably in the main line 4.Bf4 within a few hours. So I looked in the database for something else.

The nice thing is, that such a database research nowadays can be done in Lichess opening explorer! Among the games of the top players you can see a game of former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik from 2008, who played the extremely rare sideline 4.Nc3. It was "only" a rapid game, which Kramnik even lost, but I quickly realized, that the line has a positional reasoning and is perfectly playable. 4.Nc3 is objectively probably not the "best" line, but White gets a comfy position with nice central control.

(To be continued)