I’m a little over 1300 elo, and I feel it’s time to start really getting down and dirty and learning openings. I know a little bit about Scandinavian, very little about French and I’ve recently got interested in Ruy Lopez but I wanted to get the opinion of you guys to see where the next step in my chess journey should be?
I’ve been off Lemmy for a long while and I’m glad to be back on the Fediverse! Hi, guys and gals!
Hi! I would say it doesn’t matter much, as long as you pick one and stick to it. At your level, there are more important things to focus on than openings, so it pays to learn one and stick to it. Personally I chose Ruy Lopez as white (super successful, it’s easy, and I win a lot), and the Sicilian Najdorf as black (less successful, it’s hard to play well). Against d4, I play the king’s Indian or the Nimzo, but I don’t get to practice a lot.
Thank you for the advice! I’ve very much have been getting into the Ruy Lopez openings. It’s been fun learning to counter the Morphy defense with the Columbus variation. I haven’t encountered any Schlieman Variation players yet. I look forward to that! :)
What’s your kind of style?
I tend to prefer closed, positional style games. I like having my pieces back up other pieces and give a layer of protection in case they’re captured. I very much value pawns and try my best to A: form a strong pawn structure to prevent attack, and B: Disrupt my opponent’s pawn structure as well. If even a good o’ sacrifice or three is necessary. I value mobility of pieces which allows me to outmaneuver my opponents which leads me to often undervalue my queen. I know, I can survive without my queen (most times) but can my opponent?
Sorry if this was long winded, I wanted to give you a good answers.
Perfect: you have pretty much the exact same style as me. In that case I’d very much recommend the Czech Benoni against d4 (hanging pawns has a good video on it). A very positional game plan with less theory and more ideas. Alternatively you could do the king’s Indian, which has much more theory. Against e4 I quite like the pirc (there’s videos on that by Rob Ramirez), which I can also give example games to see the style involved if desired. Finally, with white I really like the colle-zukertort system (Naroditsky and Ramirez have I think both covered it, though I came across it after having seen the colle in a book).
What all these have in common is that there’s relatively little theory required (with the pirc needing the most), and they’re more focussed on ideas – the pawn breaks each is going for, and where on the board you would like to draw focus. I’d be happy to play a couple of rapid games and talk though the ideas if desired (though I’m on lichess rather than chess.com).
