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Comment by metroholografix | Hacker News Reader

Below 1700 or so, openings are mostly a waste of time and tactics rule the day. Learning the basic opening principles and two basic opening moves that you keep playing (one for white, one for black) and focusing on tactics [1][2] is in my experience the fastest way to advance.

After 1700 or so, specific openings can be studied. I suggest playing d4 instead of e4 as white (avoids dealing with the Sicilian) and as black the French defense (for e4) and the KID (for d4). This is mostly coming from the POV of getting good at the game with a minimum of theory preparation, whilst being able to deploy the same openings in blitz and bullet games if need be.

Another bonus of getting strong at tactics, is that you'll be able to see and appreciate ideas behind the openings and your game analysis will also improve. There are excellent GM analysis videos on Youtube that one can start extracting value from too.

[1] https://www.chesstactics.org

[2] https://chesstempo.com/

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The problem with tactics training is that there is always a "best answer" because they have been picked to have a best answer.

What got me playing over 1700 (lichess rating grin) were two things:

1) deepening my mental checklist: 1) am i being attacked, 2) are there unprotected pieces, 3) am I about to be forked/pinned, 4) can I fork/pin my opponent ... and increase how far down you can BFS this without getting a headache. And avoiding endgames because those are just logical grinds.

2) playing with an analysis engine like stockfish.

For me, memorizing defenses was not feasible because it is so broad, but I learned two openings (scotch and queens pawn) and at least know the defenses there because i know the openings. a little bit.

I'll keep at it, memorizing defenses, but I'm old and probably won't cram more into my brain.

EDIT: I used to go to a sunday-night chess meetup before COVID. 1700 on Lichess is nowhere near 1700 FIDE rating (of course, it was at a bar, so I'm usually a few pints in). I stopped going because I got tired of getting my ass kicked, there weren't enough mediocre players there.

As an unrated player who plays occasionally, I've also found the mental checklist you've listed in 1) to be more helpful than memorizing chess openings. I've had a pretty high "win rate" when playing non-chess enthusiasts around my workplace or friend group.

The issue I've encountered with memorizing openings is that it assumes both sides are playing perfect openings that complement each other. In reality, in my "lower rated" games, my opponent is likely to make suboptimal moves against the opening I memorized. There are ways to punish their moves, but I would've needed to memorized that. So, I have to come up with changes to the memorized opening on the spot.

Going through the checklist allows me to play without memorizing movesets even though the moves I make are not the "best".

> There are ways to punish their moves, but I would've needed to memorized that. So, I have to come up with changes to the memorized opening on the spot.

This is a good way to put it. I don't yet understand what makes an opening such a personality. Like, what the "attitude" of an opening is beyond "white tries to dominate the center with a fiancetto from the king-side and crush the opponents defenses through pressure on f7" (this is like how every Wikipedia entry on openings is written). Great, thanks! I think this is probably one of the things that separates enthusiasts from naturals, because while I get the basic point of the sentence, I don't see how that plays out for 10 moves. Or maybe I'm overthinking it. I keep waiting for it to "click" one day.

But yes, seeing someone deviate from a memorized opening doesn't help me win either!

The "personality" of an opening is the nature of imbalance it creates. For example, in a gambit, white may sacrifice a pawn in exchange for quick development and an attack. In a Dragon opening one side has a powerful bishop but also a potential weakness near their king.

The way you win in chess is to create an imbalance and then exploit your half of it. The imbalance may be on many facets, like different pieces or pawn structure or activity.

Some openings create few imbalances (e.g. Exchange Slav) and these are drawish.

> The way you win in chess is to create an imbalance and then exploit your half of it.

This is a very helpful way for me to think about future moves, because I can add to my mental checklist: "scan for any possible imbalances."

You mentioned three facets: piece imbalance, pawn structures, and weaknesses near the king (or other pieces).

Are there more?

Chess author Jeremy Silman, who champions the "imbalance" idea, gives a list:

- Minor pieces (bishops vs knights)

- Pawn structure

- Space

- Material

- Files and squares

- Development

- Initiative

I would add how much time is left on the clock, though that is not a feature of the board.

An example: say you have a bishop and your opponent has a knight. This is an imbalance, and you want to exploit it by making your bishop better than their knight. Concretely that means trading pawns, to open up the game, so your bishop can bring its long-range strengths to bear.

I'm below 1600 to 1700 on lichess, though I don't play as much there. I've found that nothing beats playing games and analyzing them afterward. The analysis is first just using my wits, then with an engine. I'm mostly looking to see where I made a mistake or where my opponent made a mistake and I missed it. I build drills to teach myself what moves to play in given positions. I use chessable for that.

I agree with the commenter who said that 1200-level players on chess.com do come with opening prep and will try to catch you out with their pet lines. Obviously it's too much to learn refutations for all the crazy gambits out there, but it's worth spending a bit of time understanding openings. The fine article we're commenting on does not go too far -- even for a beginner, it's worth knowing the difference between a Sicilian and a Caro-Kan. Even just learning the first four moves of the common openings is worthwhile, because it will save you time and energy that you need for the middlegame.

I agree that learning deep theoretical lines is a waste of time. Most likely you'll be out of book by move five in an amateur game. So learn a small number of moves (ideally, with a good reason why that move makes sense, even if it's just to develop a piece) and have some idea of the common plans that each side has in that opening.

> What got me playing over 1700 (lichess rating grin) were two things:

On what time limit? I'm ~1700 on Rapid but ~1400 on Blitz. I find you need to play a lot of games to get good at quick time limits.

Playing a lot of games doesn't make you better, unfortunately. Especially not in quicker time controls. It just cements your current habits unless you're explicitly reviewing, changing and working on aspects of your play. You have to be making the right choices, then you can work on speed.

Quicker time controls are REALLY good at producing a lot of games for you to identify patterns of your own errors, though! Take a given game, slap on stockfish, then check what tactics you're missing and what positional decisions you made that significantly impacted the bar. On an individual level, not so important, but if you start noticing trends in your errors, you can mass-puzzle the areas you're weak at, etc.

That said, this analysis only works if you know your openings. Contrary to the OP, if your openings are mediocre you can't learn that much from your games. Understanding a system or two in depth will help you develop a 'feel' for what positions are dangerous, which positions are full of potential, etc. At a certain point that intuition will stop requiring 10-15 moves of theory to be sound, and you can start free-styling.

I find modern tactics training with positions taken from real games quite useful. I finally made progress past ~2100 level in them when I stopped looking at the problems as puzzles with a hidden beautiful answer or tactical idea and just started thinking in terms “what I would play in a real game”

I am not at any skill level, but I do think that after some time studying endgame patterns, I could easily apply them in finally forcing the mate in end games, whereas studying openings seems more abstract and unclear how exactly it is going to benefit.

There are some endgame basics that new players need to learn, K&Q against K, K&R against K, K & 2 Bishops against K, how to catch a passed pawn and some others. These aren’t difficult to learn, and once you reach these basic positions you can expect your opponent to resign.

The reason for the advice to avoid end games is that the real end game contests happen with positions having a few more pawns or pieces. These positions can have a single not obvious winning move out of many alternatives. One false step can lead to a draw or loss instead of a win many moves later. Two almost identical positions can result in different outcomes even with perfect play.

1700 on lichess is about 1400-1500 on chess.com. Lichess tends to be about 200 points overrated on average.

Wait, how is that even possible? Are they not using the same ELO algorithm?

They have different player populations. A pool of Elo ratings only rates players relative to the other players in the population.

If you take everyone whose FIDE rating is between 2400-2600, and you create a new pool of Elo ratings for them, their new Elo ratings will range from 1400-1600. If you take everyone whose FIDE rating is between 1400-1600, and you create a new pool of ratings for them, their new Elo ratings will range from 1400-1600. And so on.

So what does that say about the relative strengths of the players between chess.com and lichess.com? That chess.com has the more elite players from lichess.com and so the lichess.com players are weaker on average than the chess.com players?

This is a common misconception and the ratings are not comparable across player pools. lichess starts you off at 1500 and so the center of the bell curve is 1500, chess.com starts you off at 1200, so that's where it balances the 50% at.

https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/blitz

https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/wiki/faq#wiki_my_chess.com_ra...

You can't say that based on the ratings. The parameters of the Elo system can be freely chosen, so you can't compare two implementations at all.

Maybe, but it doesn't really matter in practice. If you play against opponents with a similar rating to you then you'll be evenly matched.

Also both sites use the Glicko rating system rather than a straight ELO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glicko_rating_system

No, they use different rating algorithms. Lichess is using Glicko-2. Chess com is using Glicko.

Only differences between player ratings matter for Elo Numbers.

You can add 1,000,000 to the ratings of all players on lichess, and it wouldn't change a thing

> 2) playing with an analysis engine like stockfish.

so... cheating?

I assume they meant not "playing my games against other humans with the help of an analysis engine like Stockfish" but "playing games against an analysis engine like Stockfish". Which is not in any sense cheating.

Yes, thank you, I assumed it was obvious: I meant playing against a computer while keeping stockfish running, figuring out my next move, and then seeing what stockfish recommends, then trying to follow that line to see if it makes sense. Like asking for help from professor, except you have to figure out the answer, which doesn't always help.

I understand what you're saying and agree, although I may suggest that 1700 number come down a bit to maybe 1200. I'm around the 1000-1200 range (just picked it up again recently) and I'd say most of my peers on Chess.com around that range have definitely studied openings and present sneaky traps consistently in the first ~5-15 moves.

Playing as black for me is the real driving force for me to study openings because my black game suffers the most from actual Theory openings around 1200. It's not crucial to winning to study the openings because you can often get by with just basic positional play and simple deduction, but a cursory understanding of the most popular openings is a big bang-for-your-buck way to improve in the low 1k range, IMHO.

It is a question of opportunity cost. If you are studying openings at the expense of doing tactical puzzles and sharpening your tactics, it is not the most efficient use of your time at the 1200 level.

If you have a 1200 level tactics skill and 1500 level openings skill, you are going to be about a 1200 rated player. If you have a 1500 level skill in tactics, you are going to be about a 1500 rated player regardless of whether you've studied openings. Remember: Being able to calculate tactics better helps with openings! Just because your opponent has memorized something and you haven't doesn't mean you can't just calculate on the fly and avoid falling into obvious traps.

Yeah I'm not so sure though. I'm 1900 rated tactics on lichess but a middling 1300 on normal games. Perhaps it might be due to playing blitz where I don't have lots of time to think.

I guess it also depends on what openings you play as black. For Caro-Kann or French defense you probably only need to know some good spots for the pieces and some typical plans, but if your reply for 1.e4 is e5 (which seems to be the most popular response among beginners), then you'd better be prepared for King's and Danish gambit, Italian or Two knights defense and so on, because in all of these openings it's easy to get mated in 20 moves while making only seemingly logical moves or get into a situation when you have to find the only defensive moves, while your opponent just throws pieces at you and keep making new threats.

I'm at 2250 on Lichess, and I consider openings a waste of time. Ok, I confess I wasted a lot of time on them in the past, and my rating was rather constant for years and years, until I started tactics via the woodpecker method. It's hard work, but definitely worth it. (quite a few of the easier exercises are opening tactics)

https://www.amazon.com/Woodpecker-Method-Axel-Smith-Tikkanen...

From the (linked above) Amazon description:

> The quick explanation of the Woodpecker Method is that you need to solve a large number of puzzles in a row; then solve the same puzzles again and again, only faster. It’s not a lazy shortcut to success – hard work is required. But the reward can be re-programming your unconscious mind. Benefits include sharper tactical vision, fewer blunders, better play when in time trouble and improved intuition.

This seems pretty similar to the Chess.com "puzzle rush" game, although I'll admit that I haven't actually tried that yet.

What age did you get serious with chess? 2200 in lichess is high.

I started too late: 17

Funny how everyone that says openings are waste of time have already wasted their time on them and built an opening repertoire :)

What do you do know, play specific openings or move by instinct until reaching the middlegame? Willing to bet it's the former.

My current strategy is this (mind I do have knowlegde, it just needs expanding) Whenever I play a game, I check afterwards from the point where the preparation (and my knowledge) ended what I should have played, and if it's in line with theory.

  - If the move I played is in line with theory, I don't bother trying to remember it because I can find it. 
  - If there are more than 1 plausible move in theory and my move is one of them, don't bother because I can find it.
  - If theory happens to be something I can't find on my own, then I investigate the idea behind it and automagically I remember (at least for some time)

But you only need to get a bit better to see through the common traps even the first time. The very first time I saw a scholars mate attempted against me I thought the moves were weird and made the obvious tactical response, only end up down a pawn. I was annoyed at being down a pawn afterwards and looked it up the opening, and only then did I discover the so called trap that I unknowingly didn't fall into because there are several good defenses that someone who knows even a little tactics will discover.

Now at the 2500 level you get into sequences where you need to see a trap 15 non-forced moves in advance to not fall into it with seemingly natural moves. These can only be found in advance.

Hold on... you're 2500?

I doubt it. Actual 2500 rated players aren't looking 15 positional moves ahead during a game.

I didn't say 2500 raters players look 15 moves in advance in games (though in some simple endgames they can see farther than that). I said that they can see 15 moves in advance when they spend weeks (or even years) before the game preparing their openings. It isn't unheard of for players at the >2000 level to pull out a planned novility 15-20 moves into a game - a position never before reached in chess that they prepared for one specific opponent in a tournament.

I don't have a rating, but somewhere in the 1000-1300 range is a reasonable guess. I have beat a USCF 1500, but that was 1 game out of hundreds.

I don't need a 2500 rating to know something about how they play.

It seems more likely that the players you're facing have one safe opening that they almost always play, so they know from experience where it can accept modification at this level.

I found openings to be very useful for players rated 1000-1500 when working with my high school chess team. The main benefit is that by understanding the typical moves of an opening, you make it a lot easier to avoid dropping a piece in the first 10 or 15 moves, or ending up massively behind in development because something tricked you. You avoid a decent amount of losses that way.

Openings easily start to matter at 1400-1500. A '1700' player can usually overcome not knowing the opening lines with better tactical ability against players under 1600 or so, but it's not guaranteed. It's a rather antiquated idea that openings are reserved only for players over a certain level, especially these days given the immense amount of tools and training available to new players.

At the very least, all players need an understanding of opening fundamentals.

> Below 1700 or so, openings are mostly a waste of time

Why? I'm not at that level but I'm sure it can't hurt. I'm not talking about spending hours studying openings, but simply being able to name things is helpful. That way you can pick new ideas along the way, memorize past mistakes more easily, communicate with other players. And it doesn't take much time to know the first few moves of the most common openings.

I think the problem happens that a lot of players start learning theoretical opening lines 10+ moves deep, when they really should be focused on just the first few moves and basic patterns / ideas from there along with traps.

To add to this, the advice I've been given as a new/low rating chess player is to study endgames, if you must study something specific.

Specifically for endgames you pretty much only need to know two patterns that are rather algorithmic:

How to close a game where you’re up a rook or a queen (without stalemating).

How to close a game where you’re up one pawn, if it’s not a forced stalemate.

Two bishops is maybe something you want to learn. Theoretically knight + bishop as well. I play a lot of bullet chess and pretty much never see these though.

The rest you can really only learn with practice and pattern recognition, like how to move your pawns and how to use a minor piece to secure a win. Well, you can try to learn it algorithmically but I wouldn’t recommend it. After learning those I would move onto tactics, because those are generally how you gain a material or positional advantage that doesn’t rely on a very trivial mistake like leaving a piece uncovered.

There's an old story about a GM who wound up with bishop + knight versus king and realized he'd forgotten how to do it.

Even Women's Chess Champion forgot it once: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFF5ibgB6eA

I have ~3000 blitz games in Lichess and I have never once had to play 2 bishops or bishop knight end games.

I had to play B + N over the board early in my career, so it's definitely YMMV. It takes very little study: For B + N knowing that you mate in the corner that matches the color of the bishop, and that the knight needs to 'lead' in the effort to corral the king is all you really need to know. A half day of practice would cement it, I suspect.

I think bishop+knight endgame could be much more common if players actually tried to get them when defending after exchanges of queens and rooks. So, exchange as many pawns as possible and maybe sacrifice a piece for a couple of last pawns and here your opponent goes.

Also, if memory servers me I've seen two grandmaster games only during this week, where this endgame could happen, but the players didn't want their opponents to show the technique. One of these games was yesterday: https://www.chessbomb.com/arena/2020-russian-championship-su...

But indeed, rook endgames are way much more important from a practical point of view.

I like Bobby Fisher's approach to teaching beginners:

Study mating.

Chess is not about how you start but how you end.

You can get pretty decent payoffs tactically just from learning common opening traps as well as common plans of development / attack though.

Particularly if you are weak tactically, you're going to walk into opening traps / blunders if you aren't aware of them.

The only players I've seen in online blitz that didn't know openings were the 1200s (i.e. complete noob). Anyone rated over 1700 will know openings and middlegame and endgame and tactics and strategy.

For blitz openings are essential and the difference between playing into a solid middlegame position in 10 seconds versus wasting one minute reaching an almost equal position.

I'm not experienced with Chess, how do you know when you reach a certain level?. Is there an "official" way of knowing when you hit 1700?

All the major chess websites and organizations use a similar Elo-like rating system where 1500 is about the 50th percentile. So, roughly speaking, 1700 probably means "when you're at the 70th percentile of active chess players".

One example: https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/blitz

Ratings on chess sites are massively inflated compared to USCF/FIDE ratings. 1700 on lichess is probably somewhere around 1200 USCF.

It is not really inflated, they just use a different middle point. Lichess start you at 1500 and therefore, 1500 will be the median point of the distribution, Chess.com start you at 1200 so this will tend to be the median point.

It is really obvious when you look at the stats for classical or rapid for example: https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/classical

Actually looks like it's around 1500 USCF. https://chessgoals.com/rating-comparison/#Lichess_Rating_vs_...

I bet "The queen's gambit" Netflix series is causing inflation as well.

I'd guess that's also why this is on the front page.

By the way, if the goal is to get better at chess and not just have some fun, a huge waste of time is playing blitz and not analyzing your games. There are so many people who played thousands of blitz games online with no improvement whatsoever.

Blitz and even bullet are great for tactics and pattern recognition, especially for < 2000 rated players.

The King's Indian as a way to avoid theoretical preparation? Seriously? That's one of the most difficult and theory heavy openings in all of chess. I abandoned it because it was just too much work.

At the higher level you are right. At my level, 1500 FIDE, it is considered an opening where you can develop slowly and quietly and it gives black a lot of options.

Agreed on the main point. Wasting time on memorizing openings instead of playing chess is probably the most common rookie mistake.

Though I do well avoiding Sicilian by playing Alapin (e4 c5 c3).

> Below 1700 or so

On what rating system? USCF? Lichess? Chess.com?

how does one study tactics?

Tactics trainers:

https://lichess.org/training/

https://chesstempo.com/chess-tactics/

https://www.chess.com/puzzles

I'm curious if anyone has advice on how to interpret the ratings in the tactics trainers. Should they map roughly to your in-game rating? I'm pretty new to chess and still pretty bad (just under 1000 online, I make a lot of blunders and/or fall for opponents' tactics) but my rating is 1750 on the tactics trainer.

I would imagine at some point the tactics are not the bottleneck and I should be working on something else instead (openings, endgames, or studying mid-game strategy?) but just wondering where that point is.

> Should they map roughly to your in-game rating?

For a typical player, the chess.com puzzles rating is at least 500 points higher than the blitz rating on this site.

I think tactics shouldn't be on focus only for very strong players, such as FMs or IMs, but you definitely don't need to choose one instead of another. It's fine to learn some tactics, then some strategy, then some endgames, isn't it?

Among chess.com players who have played 10+ blitz games and 10+ puzzles, the average difference between their blitz rating and puzzle rating is 45 (blitz rating higher). The standard deviation of the difference is 374.

Among players who have played 100+ games/100+ puzzles, the difference is -205: puzzle rating substantially higher, standard deviation 320.

I'm not sure that it's ideal for ratings to be identical across the domains, but they should correlate to some degree.

> Should they map roughly to your in-game rating?

For lichess at least, they don't. I'm a 2100 tactics and nowhere near that in actual rating (around 1500).

You can make grandmaster studying only tactics and playing games. However most branch out long before then because there are other useful things to learn as you get good.

As I mention in my own comment, Winning Chess by Fred Reinfeld and Irving Chernev. BEST book I've encountered by far of the dozens I've owned.

Nice! Validation for my training. I always play D4, and French if possible. As a hobbyist it give me options.

I disagree with you. I think learning openings will help you just as much as tactics even at a level way below 1700. I posted about this on my site [1] but the tl:dr is that opening principles are not always enough to get to a good position and learning openings the right way will help you develop at later stages.

[1] https://listudy.org/en/blog/when-to-learn-chess-openings

Study joseki, lose two stones, eh?

> Below 1700 or so, openings are mostly a waste of time

Here is a counter argument - below 1700, someone who knows the strength of an opening would outperform those who do not.

The opening strength will only work when you know how to exploit something small in opponent's opening like a miss of tempo or wrong reply, which I think is above the skill of sub 1700. All the players above 1000 know basic principles like mobility of pieces and developing centre.

> The opening strength will only work when you know how to exploit something small in opponent's opening like a miss of tempo or wrong reply

That's exactly what I am saying. If one person knows the strength of an opening and the other person don't then the person who knows the opening has a clear advantage. I agree with @skulk's argument though - the time is better spent on learning tactics and analyzing games over learning many opening given the player is sticking to some particular openings.

> the opening has a clear advantage

not exactly if the person can't use the slight advantage for their benefit. They only have window of 2-3 moves at max to exploit less developed pieces else the advantage fades away(assuming non point positional advantage). It is hard for 1700s to exploit very minor advantage and most of the time the win is due to a blunder by opponent.

What I said was conditioned on player sticking to few opening that s/he knows very well. It not hard to convert the advantage to a win, and it's also not obvious that some move is a blunder until after it becomes obvious.

1700 rating is not very clearly defined since different Chess websites uses different ranking system and the rating can vary dramatically. For example, on average there are 400 points difference between chess.com and lichess.com ranking.

The amount of opening preparation that's useful for a sub-1700 is minimal; diminishing returns due to not understanding middlegame positional ideas and shaky tactics hit really hard. When I was really into chess as a kid ~15 years ago, I spent a ton of time reading opening preparation but it was definitely time that I should have spent simply analyzing high level play in all stages of the game because my opponents either didn't know the theory (so while they technically deviated into "worse" lines, I had no hope of understanding why they are "worse" in the general case) or more rarely, they know how to avoid common theory.

I think the most important opening prep for a novice is learning what lines to avoid at all costs. A lot of this, though, can be established with the basics: develop pieces, castle early, control center. Any time your opponent tempts you into violating any of these, think thrice.

I disagree. If there are two 1700 players, the opening player is only better if the game goes according to the prepared moves. A good tactical player who realizes you are going via prep will make a stupid move and pull you out of book. From this point on the tactical player has the advantage because he has experience defending random stuff, while the opening player has to figure out why the move so stupid it isn't even in his book is bad and exploit that. Of course if the stupid move is in the opening book then the opening player is better, but that is unlikely.

> A good tactical player who realizes you are going via prep will make a stupid move and pull you out of book.

That only works against a badly prepared player. Learning an opening isn't just about memorising moves, it is also about understanding why the moves -- both your own and your opponent's -- are good. If you have studied an opening well, you will understand why a stupid move is stupid and be able to punish it. Of course you may still end up messing things up and lose the game later on, but you should be able to emerge from the opening with an advantage.

> pull you out of book.

Openings do not necessary break here. They are meant to take advantage of a situation by a series of branched off movement. If you are not making good enough guess about why a particular opening is played - making one move to pull somebody out of the book won't do much good.

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