I was wondering if any books explain the theory of opening, in a basic format? I don’t mean advanced theory, but the first moves. I looked at a dozen books on the Sicilian, and every book started at move 5 or later (depending on the line).
I was just curious if any books explain the first few moves, and why its a popular opening, or not popular, if that.
The book doesn’t have to cover every opening, but just openings in general, while highlighting some of the more common openings. I’m interested in the first few moves, rather than later moves. (My own opening repetoire is fairly short, although it has expanded a lot in the last couple years.)
I think if I got a better understanding of the “why” in the first moves, then studying a particular opening (in which the annotations start at move 5 or later), would be more productive.
My current FICS quick rating is in the mid 1300’s, and my standard FICS rating is around 1550. (My quick rating is going up pretty steady in the last few weeks, I should break 1400 soon.)
Reuben Fine’s “The Ideas Behind the Chess Openings” may be what you’re looking for. It was written in 1943, so it won’t have all the latest stuff in it.
The “Starting Out…” openings books do a nice job of explaining from the first moves what to do plus what the opening is aiming for in the middle game.
The John Watson series of books “Mastering the Chess Openings” vol. 1-4, cover a variety of openings and move order problems. The introductory chapter in the first volume which covers opening principles and paradoxes is worth the price of the book for the average player. The rest of the book selects main lines and directions the opening has gone and/or may be heading.
“Logical Chess Move by Move” by Irving Chernev explains each move of an opening and the rest of the game in an easy reading style for beginning and slightly more advanced players who want to understand not just memorize chess columsn in ECO.
For very beginning players, I recommend “Your First Chess Games” by John Walker to see how principles operate and how quickly bad moves can be punished.
But none of these books will do any good unless you seriously read them and play, play, play. You learn from your mistakes and the hopefully helpful advice of other players.
Some will find the explanations of opening moves in Chernev’s Logical Chess: Move by Move too basic, but it’s certainly digestible.
Evans’s What’s the Best Move is far from comprehensive, but it teaches students general principles (and their exceptions!)
Fine’s Ideas … is indeed the classic response to your question. It’s dated.
Sam Collins’s Understanding the Chess Openings is pitched to a lower level than Watson’s books, but still excellent. A good followup to Fine.
P.S. if you have any knowledge of German, pick up a used copy of Keres’s Dreispringerspiel bis Königsgambit: forty years old, but an incredibly fun book.
Another approach would be to discard the notion that it’s possible to understand the chess openings, and what really matters is the practical statistical results from a large database of master level games.
Either you follow the main line (most popular) or you decide to vary. The trick is knowing when to vary. I believe you’ll find that most good chess players stick to the main line fairly deep, until there aren’t enough games remaining in the database(s) to indicate the correct continuation with much significance. At that point you might want to consult some opening theory such as commented games.
So I believe a good approach is to learn the main lines first, just rote memorization, understanding not required. That gives you a basis to develop a deeper understanding and explore other lines (variations) later.
Statistical analysis, whether of databases or the old “Blue Book Charts,” is a very questionable approach. Problem 1: Many dubious variations score very well until someone refutes them after which no one in his right mind will play them again. You’re left with a big plus for a losing variation. Problem 2: The really big databases include lots of games form kiddy and amateur tournaments, in which the play is simply abominable. Statistical results are often garbled down to noise level.
One way to get around this is to have a series of databases such as All games, All games since 2000, All games since 2005. If a line has been recently refuted it will show up in the statistics by examining this series.
Of course they do, which is interesting to see more variations and maybe get some new ideas. But proper statistical analysis only uses databases of master level games. Here you can have a series of databases too such as All games where both players are rated 2200+, All with both rated 2400+, and All with both rated 2600+. This is also instructive, and significant I believe, statistically.
I would recommend Fundamental Chess Openings. It attempts to go over the general goal of each opening, and goes into great detail on the initial choices that must be made in each. For most openings, it only goes about a handful of moves in, but it is thorough. I have yet to find an opening not covered in it. It is also a newer book.
I’m hesitant to respond to this, since I’m not a chess coach or even an active player these days, but it seems to me that this is exactly the wrong approach for a player rated around 1300-1500. Even assuming the moves that he memorizes are the best ones, what happens when his opponent varies from the book, which is likely to happen fairly early at that level? He’ll have played a series of master-level moves without understanding why he played them, and he’ll have no real idea of what he should do next. Besides that he’d probably be better off studying tactics and elementary endgames than spending his time memorizing openings.
In answer to the original question: there are a lot of good books out there which explain the reasons for playing the early moves in the opening. Unfortunately many of the books that I grew up with are in descriptive notation and are probably out of print, but there are alternatives which were written more recently.
I think Chernev’s “Logical Chess Move By Move” is a great book for players rated 1300-1500, and there’s an algebraic version of it now. It’s an old book, though, so it mainly covers older openings. John Nunn wrote a book in a similar style: “Understanding Chess Move By Move”. It doesn’t have a comment after every move played in every game as Chernev’s book did, but it does have a comment for most moves, including the very first ones, and it’s more up to date.
One book that I like which is most likely out of print is “How to Open a Chess Game” (1974). Seven grandmasters each wrote a chapter. The first two chapters, by Larry Evans and Svetozar Gligoric, provide a good basic introduction to opening play.
Another book I found useful was “How to Think Ahead in Chess” by Horowitz and Reinfeld. This is a repertoire book: it recommends one opening for White (Stonewall Attack), one defense against 1.e4 (Sicilian Dragon) and one defense against 1.d4 (Lasker’s Defense in the Queen’s Gambit Declined). It uses descriptive notation, it’s dated and it’s probably out of print, but it’s very good about showing how to form a plan in the opening instead of just memorizing moves. One unique feature of the book is that it talks about every piece and pawn (for one side only) and shows where that piece or pawn is likely to be developed in that opening and why. I haven’t seen that anywhere else. There are a lot of repertoire books out there, but most of them won’t give the same kind of basic explanations.
One thing that I think is very important when you are studying the openings is to keep the scoresheet from every serious game that you play and go over the opening after the game. That’s how I’d use a book like Modern Chess Openings or a database like MegaBase: not to memorize moves but to compare the opening moves played in your games with the moves played by the masters and try to understand why the masters’ moves are better than the ones played by you and your opponent - assuming that they are! What I did when I was playing in tournaments was to enter the scores of my games into a ChessBase database and annotate them, annotating at least the opening of every game even if I didn’t have time to annotate the entire game. If I made a mistake in the opening, or failed to exploit my opponent’s mistake, I’d try to remember that position so I wouldn’t make the same mistake in future games.
I consider it analogous to taking a college level course in organic chemisty. There is really only one way to do it effectively. Memorize, memorize, memorize, and then memorize some more! Only after you have the basic structure in mind, from memorizing the mainline chess openings, can you begin to really understand things. It’s also like the skeleton of your body, your bones, upon which hangs everything else that makes up who you are.
So my advice is to forget about understanding and memorize, memorize, memorize! Understanding will come later with experience and practice, and you can’t get that out of a book.
Memorization without understanding is often counter-productive, whether that’s in chess or other fields of study. Yeah, I’ve know more than a few people who got through grad school doing that, but they seldom use the ‘knowledge’ they memorized, even when they should.
It is better to know WHY some move (like h3) is commonly played in some opening rather than to know it is move XX in many lines and move YY in other lines.
Chess openings, even ones that are considered sound, tend to have up and down cycles, and that might interfere with the time-weighted frequency of play concept.
Moreover, except for world-class players, knowing what openings are currently in favor among Grandmasters is not likely to be much help at a local tournament.
Computers are the new role model in this area. They’re pretty good now, well over 3000 Elo, far better than the best humans. So if you seek true understanding, ask a computer, not a human.
Computers can tell you what the best move is (more or less) in any position, but they aren’t very good at explaining why one move is better than another, other than by giving variations. When I was playing in tournaments I used Fritz to help me annotate my games by showing what would have happened if this or that move had been played. One feature I liked was the full game analysis mode. I let Fritz run overnight over a period of a couple of weeks and analyzed all my games that way. It was good for finding missed tactical shots but I wouldn’t use it as a substitute for human analysis and explanations.
It’s significant that the best computer programs rely on opening books (repertoires) prepared by human grandmasters, rather than generating them themselves. Not that I’m an expert on the subject, but my impression is that computers are still better at tactics than at positional subtleties.
I agree. I’ve played h3 a few times, only to fall prey to the sacrificial bishop attack. (And I’ve played it countless times with great results.)
But my goal isn’t to memorize openings at all, but achieve a greater understanding of how to read a board in the opening to understand what the oppenent is trying to achieve, and understand what my own current repetiore is trying to achieve, and maybe expand my own opening repetiore with a few more lines.
I want to be able to see what the opponent is up to, in order to prepare a response, especially important when the game gets out book. (I mean understanding beyond the current position, to a stratigic point of view.) So if the opponet play h3 early in the game (and my bishop is nowhere near going to the g4 square), I’ll be able to think… ahh he’s trying to do this or that.
I was reading just this current issue of Chess Life and a GM was going over a high school game (opponents about 2100 to 2200), and on a particular move, the GM noted that Rybka or some other high level chess engine suggested a certain move, but the GM said that the chosen move was just as good. So I agree, just puting a game through a chess engine doesn’t really do much other than offer great moves with zero real explanation. (Appending the line of “best moves” after said engine suggestion doesn’t do much either, since it assumes best moves, and only a single line, which would invariably change after a couple more moves anyway, unless it was forced moves.)
Evans’s book is particularly good on imparting general principles from specific examples, then noting their exceptions, and the exceptions to the exceptions. E.g., it’s OK to ignore development to grab a free center pawn, except when there’s a direct refutation!
If one learns to think about the openings like this at the Class C/D level, one needs very little specific opening knowledge until Class A.
Gaining an “understanding” of an opening does not mean that the understanding will be long remembered.
A forgotten understanding is of no practical value during a live OTBoard chess game.
Besides, most memorizations of openings must be based on some amateur level understanding. If you memorized an opening, you very likely understood all the moves you still remember a couple days later.
It is harder to memorize moves or anything else as a raw meaningless sequence.
Memorization has a bad reputation in opening study, but I think reputation is inaccurate.
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