That seems reasonable, but at the same time my understanding is that there’s enormous value in novice and intermediate players to memorizing openings. I wonder if that effect is significant enough to categorize chess as another high-rote-memorisation-affinity task.
Learning openings beyond a very basic level is not going to help the club player very much and it’s generally a good way for them to waste their time, at least from an improving your ELO perspective.
Being the best out of the opening will typically put you a “quarter pawn” ahead, maybe putting you ahead as white or equalizing as black. Then if you’re a novice you will immediately hang a knight and end up 2.75 pawns behind. Then your opponent will hang a bishop and you’ll be a quarter pawn ahead again.
The other problem with learning opening theory against novices is you will learn 30 moves a side of Ruy Lopez opening theory and your opponent won’t get 10 moves without leaving theory rendering your study moot.
There’s far more emphasis on memorizing openings at the grandmaster level because people are playing a tight enough game elsewhere for that slight advantage to really matter, and because of all the pre-game preperation where teams of grandmasters and chess engines will come up with novel moves to throw an opponent off balance while the star player memorizes the lines. To the point of grandmasters like Bobby Fischer complain it ruined the game and inventing variants like chess960. All super grandmasters have outlier memorization abilities.
Generally club players just need to rote memorize not too deeply and understand the broad sweeping ideas and key moves of the openings (when white does that, counter them with this). That should allow them to come up with reasonable moves on the fly which might be the best or third best moves. Memorizing fewer openings at first is probably better. At the more casual level memory is much less important.
> Being the best out of the opening will typically put you a “quarter pawn” ahead, maybe putting you ahead as white or equalizing as black. Then if you’re a novice you will immediately hang a knight and end up 2.75 pawns behind. Then your opponent will hang a bishop and you’ll be a quarter pawn ahead again.
While this is true if you know openings, many openings have a trap or two that make up a very tricky line that puts you 3-5 points ahead. Knowing the traps and how to punish them is a huge material advantage in some games. So while knowing your opening well is "worth" only a quarter pawn in a typical game, it is worth a several-percent increase in win rate from knowing these lines.
Openings like the Jobava London system have 10-20 different trap lines like this, and if you want to play them, you must know the lines.
It is very common for players with your mindset to plateau around 1400-1600, at which point it's time to sit down and start memorizing openings and endgames. Just being good at searching the game tree gets you to that point, but now you need to know the times when the game tree collapses 30 moves later.
There was a guy Michael De La Maza who literally just drilled tactics and broke 2000 USCF and then quit chess, and if you look at his games yes he really really did not understand openings. So 1400-1600 is well before when you’re going to plateau without knowing openings.
1400 yes learning a trap line can improve your results, so if you subscribe to the Eric Rosen school of opening theory you can benefit from openings. I’ve just never thought it’s worth learning much about conventional openings until about 1600.
> When all is said and done, I can’t recommend Rapid Chess Improvement (a book that, in my view, offers a philosophically bankrupt vision of what chess is). It smacks of "the blind leading the blind.” But, as I said earlier, his book might prove useful for some.
Also, a rating improvement from a 1300 start after a long spell of no rated games often means a lot of skill improvement in that gap, and then a corresponding adjustment in rating. Perhaps the guy was a bridge or Magic: the Gathering player and already had a decent intuition for games and needed to transfer that to chess. Disregarding that drilling 1000 tactical problems sounds a lot like a memorization plan to me, he also clearly knows the e4 opening given the game analysis quoted in Silman's review.
> Like many adults, he assumed that he needed to augment his natural skills and intelligence by compiling chess knowledge: he studied openings, endgames, and other "chess knowledge" information. Despite all that accumulation of knowledge, he was getting nowhere.
Huh... did someone study some openings and endgames? His tactical game was likely the weakest part of his game so he remedied that error and got rapid improvement. Not in spite of failing to study openings and endgames, but because he did study them, just out of order.
Sure he didn't know the quarter-pawn-advantage grandmaster lines (which you don't need to know as a 1600), but he knew the traps and how to avoid them.
