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Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

As a novice player, it's frustrating to read stories about players beating other players "by the book," i.e. they know more openings than the other player does, so they play some unexpected opening and just destroy the opponent out of the gate. I guess this is possible in just about any game, not just chess, but it seems to reduce the optimal learning process for a novice to "start memorizing things". Bah. Edit: Not that memorization is bad or boring by necessity, but finding a way to make the memorization fun and interesting is in itself frustrating, knowing that you could learn openings really fast just by brute-forcing the various lines into your brain with things like memory palace techniques.

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This is an argument that is raised a lot in chess circles. While there's some truth behind it, it tends to be applicable much more in an environment where both players are trying really hard to play "in book".

Before you get too deep into openings, you should have a solid understanding of the strengths of individual pieces. This leads to a better understanding of why you'd want to put your pieces in certain places. It kind of explains the broad strokes of openings, without the little traps here and there. This is known as the Russian school of teaching.

Basically, learning from this direction, you can spend much less time studying openings. You might want to know about few common traps in common situations that you tend to use, but that's not the focus. And you'd be surprised at how well this works - barring a tiny number of games where you're caught out, your better understanding of the overall game will win out.

Essentially, overspecialising in opening repertoire at the novice level is a kind of arms race which only really works against other similar players. It's not a good long-run strategy.

Knowing an opening isn't the same as memorising moves. Knowing the opening is more about understanding the position, it's strength and weaknesses, the immediate tactics available, and the natural flow of pieces towards their strategical aims.

Yes, tactical lines do require more knowledge of concrete lines, because they are complicated to work out over the board. But at that point the memorisation should be a "summary shortcut" of your understanding or assessment of the position.

If it were about memorisation, what happens when both players reach the end of their memorised lines? If it's not mate, or one player being substantially better off (in which case, why did the other player memorise that line too), how do you proceed from there?

And that's where knowing an opening comes to the fore, the important part of the opening isn't the moves themselves, but how the game opens up to the middle-game. Understanding the types and structure of the middle-game that's derived from the opening is a far more valuable investment of time. For instance, knowing how to play with and against an isolated d-pawn - a significant number of opening variations lead to these kind of structures. Hedgehog structures, static double-pawn structures, backward pawns, outposts on an open file.

Knowing how to play a position is long term more valuable than memorising a routine of moves. Understanding over rote-repetition.

Granted, some positions are predominantly tactical, and those you need to calculate - either at the board, or before hand. Memorisation is a poor substitute for actual experience.

One of my proudest over-the-board achievements was understanding how to exploit the positional drawbacks of the Black side of a Stonewall Dutch. And beating a player 600-700 Elo stronger than me because I understood the White knight manoeuvre from f3-e5-d3, before exposing Black's backward e6-pawn by opening the centre with the f3 + e4 pawn advances. I spent a week trying to understand one model game of that opening, white's plan was logical, and the strategic aim of exposing the backward e6 pawn easy to understand and attempt.

The "purpose" of the opening is to get yourself into the sort of middlegame position you like to play. (Some players love having white against a French Defense, for example, while other are quite comfortable with black's side of it.) Understanding which types of positions you prefer takes experience, and while you're gaining that experience at the lower levels tactical skill can dominate. So it can seem like knowing the "book" moves for a bunch of openings is important when in fact the problem is that your opponent has better tactical skills than you or perhaps you have trouble judging a position and developing a plan. That's why specializing in a few openings can be helpful -- you get lots of practice with similar middlegame positions at the same time you limit the number of lines you have to deal with.

Now if you like open games such as the King's or Evans Gambits (i.e., fashions of 100+ years ago) things will get tactically bloody pretty quickly and so gaining a knowledge of where the booby traps are will be prudent. But if your taste runs to semi-open games, say, you can limit your opening study to a relatively small number. I happen to like the Dutch Stonewall formation as black for example, and the precise move order for getting into a position I'm comfortable with doesn't require a lot of memorization.

Happily we live in a time when computers can not only entertain us in chess but also help us with learning chess. You can improve your tactical skills by studying a tactical positions card deck in Anki for example. Or you can work on a particular opening by setting the computer to always start games from a particular position. You can use that same starting position trick to train yourself in endgame play. The important thing is to find ways to keep the game fun while you improve your play.

If you are a novice player, you really don't have to worry about this. Memorizing opening lines doesn't become an important part of the game until you are a very good tournament chess player. Until you are much better, it is far, far more important to have a general understanding of opening principles and a good eye for tactics.

This is not to say that opening study is not very important at higher levels, and if that upsets you in principle about the game, I totally understand. But it distresses me to see novices give up on chess because they are under the impression that at their level it's all about memorizing some killer opening shots.

Note that high-level Go play requires a lot of memorization too (joseki, life and death status of common shapes, etc.).

That happens mostly at the high levels, in novice to intermediate levels if your adversary plays an unorthodox move in the opening and you play by principles you have the advantage.

Yes, that is the reason many good chess players switch to the game of go. For example Jan Bogaerts in belgium was about 2350 ELO before switching to go.

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