How to Study Chess Openings – Guide Ebook

I have just published a new ebook that summarizes many of the writings on this blog, with many additions and revisions. It covers many aspects of opening preparation that I think are largely missing in current chess literature and I had to struggle to discover on my own, of course with great help from my mentors over the years. It is available on Amazon and Kobo.

From the introduction:

There is an interesting paradox in the chess community - many coaches and teachers warn players of all levels against the excessive obsession with opening theory and yet the vast majority of chess materials in digital or printed form are dedicated to specific opening variations or positions. While everyone admits that memorizing variations will never guarantee success in over the board or online encounters, there is clearly a demand for products that help chess players of all levels to successfully navigate through the first stage of the game. At the same time, there is a lack of detailed discussion regarding how seasoned players (expert level and above) structure their work on chess openings, store their analysis, come up with new ideas, prepare for tournament games and so on. Rather than provide another set of variations, key positions and critical games in a specific opening area, this book is meant to fill this gap and help the reader to make sense from all the information that is out there and save as much time and energy as possible, while still building a bulletproof opening repertoire. The book is aimed at any chess player who wants to improve their opening play and is looking for some guidance in that area.

Despite the large proliferation of computer chess software, there is a lack of explanation for how to tie to it effectively to one's study of openings. In the most advanced book on the subject, 'Opening Preparation', published in 1990s, the renowned coach Mark Dvoretsky, while giving great coverage for other topics, described the system for storing opening analysis on paper cards, with a side note that this was outdated and software should be used instead and that this was a large topic deserving a separate discussion. Since then there was a deafening silence on the subject in chess books, at least partially inspiring this publication, which outlines the system for storing opening analysis that served the author well for almost a decade.

Good opening preparation is all about picking the right direction for opening research and investing time into fine-tuning the understanding of favourable positions that are most likely to occur in our games. The basic premise throughout the book is to base one's opening preparation on 3 E's:

• Enjoyable - the positions that you analyze during opening preparation should appeal to your chess taste, and the process itself should feel pleasant and creative. See the section on 'Creativity' for more details.
• Effective - ultimately it should bring good results during tournament games, and be targeted at the positions that are most likely to occur on the board. This is covered under sections on Cutting Opponent's Options, Transpositions, and so on. Our choice of opening variations is more likely to make our work effective than anything else.
• Efficient - this not as important as effectiveness, but we still don't want to waste time and analysis, so various computer tools are suggested to optimize the 'how' of opening analysis, save our work, and efficiently retrieve it.

While it has plenty of examples and annotated games, this book deals with opening preparation in general. For books on specific openings, the reader might want to explore other books in the "Opening Preparation" Series:

• Spanish Opening - Strategy and Tactics also serves as a repertoire book for White
• Exchange Slav - Strategy and Tactics covers the particular opening and pawn structure for both sides
• Isolated Queen Pawn: Strategy and Tactics spans multiple openings, but focuses on a single common pawn structure

   
Contents:
1. Introduction
2. Building a Repertoire - Motivation and General Principles
2.1. Opening Preparation - Therapeutic?
2.2. Gaining Advantage on the Clock
2.3. Acceleration of Play - How Faster Time Controls Affect Preparation
3. Building a Repertoire - How to Do This
3.1. Developing repertoire - Write it Down!
3.2. How To Make a Tree in Digital format
3.2.1. Step 1 - Obtain and Format the Database with ECO list of Openings
3.2.2. Step 2 - Select and Tag Openings that Belong to your Repertoire
3.2.3. Step 3 - Add Custom Analysis in a Separate Database that Contains only Repertoire Openings
3.3. Example of a Specific Opening Preparation - Two Knights Defence for Black
3.4. Building Repertoire - Cutting out Opponent's Options
3.5. Reducing Material to Learn - Transpositions to the Rescue
4. Creativity
4.1. Ideas That Work Across Openings
4.2. Noticing Patterns - Seeing the Forest for the Trees
5. Learning from the Grandmasters
5.1. Jonny Hector's wins against 4.Ng5 in the Two Knights Defence
5.2. Short approach against the Scandinavian
5.3. Pavasovic attacks with Isolated pawn
5.4. Nadezhda Kosintseva plays with Isolated Pawn to beat the French
5.5. Ilya Smirin's games Vs The French, Delayed Castling, attacking Pawn Chain, etc ...
5.6. Studying the Classics
5.7. How to Find New Chess Ideas
6. Common Mistakes During Opening Preparation
6.1. Trusting your Sources without Applying your Intuition
6.2. The Impact of Computers on Opening Preparation
6.3. Overestimating Opponent's Preparation
7. Opening Duels - Specific Opponent and Opening Preparation
7.1. Alapin Sicilian - How Dangerous is the Kingside Attack?
7.2. Central Gambit - Move Order Tricks
7.3. Najdorf Sicilian - Avoiding Time Trouble
7.4. Queen's Gambit Accepted - Opening Advantage does not Guarantee Success
7.5. Queen's Gambit Accepted - Choosing a Pawn Structure
7.6. Repairing the Repertoire
7.7. Following the Middlegame plan
8. Memorizing Openings
8.1. Information Overload
8.2. Memorizing Chess Openings
8.3. Why Less Is More When it Comes to Opening Repertoire
8.4. Anand on Studying Chess with Computers and Memory
9. Summary - Checklists
9.1. 10 steps to a Better Chess Opening Repertoire
9.2. Checklist for Maintaining Opening Repertoire in Digital Form
9.3. 10 Additional Reasons to Build an Opening Repertoire
10. About the Author
11. Symbols and Abbreviations Used in the Book
11.1. Position Evaluation
11.2. Move Evaluation

Why Less Is More When it Comes to Opening Repertoire

Garry Kasparov was notorious for claiming that during his most productive years as an opening researcher, his database of theoretical analysis grew in size by many megabytes. I would not be surprised if these files gave him a competitive advantage over many opponents. For a mere mortal, however, these megabytes of analysis are likely to be a burden for many reasons.
A large opening repertoire

• takes longer to build in the first place
• needs to be memorized and recalled during games
• is more prone to errors in evaluations of critical positions, and as computers get stronger – needs to be periodically reassessed
• may become useless when chess fashion moves to a different direction, and everybody stops playing those “sharp popular lines”
• is more difficult to maintain and update over the years, even if it is digital

While you hope a larger opening repertoire gives you more flexibility, usually the reason your opening files grow large – is because your favourite opening lines give opponent a lot of options, and you have to consider all of them in your preparation. The key to making it manageable - is to limit those options by finding early but solid deviations that you are comfortable with, striking a balance between playing sound lines, and not falling into your opponent’s favourite variations.

Studying Chess Openings – How to Track Your Progress

It is not enough to develop an opening repertoire, it also needs to be continuously refined and practiced. Here is a quick tutorial on how to do this with a free version of Chess Position Trainer. I had previously posted a video tutorial on this tool.
Step 1 – Import Repertoire from PGN file

For now I imported my White Repertoire, which I have been long maintaining in a pgn file/database.
Step 2 – Choose variations to practice
As a starting point, I’d like to limit my practice to Sicilian and Scandinavian defences.

Step 3 – Track your progress
In training mode – alternate between “Only New” and “Only Learned”

Right now, I have only practiced 28 positions out of over 3000, so I have long ways to go, but this gives me a clear picture of where I am at!

Watching the Candidates Tournament - How Sveshnikov Studies The Opening

As I was watching the Russian-language broadcast of one of the rounds of the Candidates Tournament, I was curious to hear how Evgeny Sveshnikov studies newly encountered opening positions.

His algorithm is as follows:
- check his own games
if none found
- check good GM games
if none found
- check Houdini

Food for thought ...

Checklist for Maintaining Opening Repertoire in Digital Form

To improve your chess preparation, you want to keep track of your openings in a digital opening repertoire. I already blogged with an example for creating an opening repertoire in my post titled "Opening Preparation - How to make a Tree". It can be maintained in various database  packages, with the output being stored as a single game, looking like this (example from SCID):

Now I am reviewing my opening preparation and I came up with a checklist for maintaining such a tree:

1. Add diagrams to have at least one diagram per game
2. Cut down lines that I will never play myself
3. Add verbal evaluations and explanations of plans wherever possible
4. Add symbol evaluations wherever possible
5. Add my slow and rapid games for completeness
6. Re-evaluate sharp lines with computer and give them a more definite evaluation
7. Remove lines from the repertoire that I completely stopped playing and will never play again
8. Keep repertoire games sorted by ECO
9. Search and highlight tactical combinations anywhere in the repertoire database
10. Label each repertoire game appropriately to distinguish my White from my Black repertoire

This may seem tedious, but this sure beats maintaining the same information on paper!

Video Guide to the Spanish Opening – Repertoire for White

I have made quite a few videos about the Spanish Opening, and wrote an eBook “Spanish Opening - Strategy and Tactics” about it that will give you a brief introduction to the Spanish from the White perspective. To give an overall map/overview to the various variations and to show how my videos fit together, I created this guide with diagrams and links to my videos. Now you can quickly find the video for the variation that you are interested in!

Spanish Opening - Overview
1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5

This move characterizes the Spanish Opening.

3. ... a6 4. Ba4 Nf6 5. O-O

Black's first big decision is on move 5, he can choose between the classical lines, and the two sharp alternatives - the Moeller Variation, and the Open Variation.

5. ... Be7

( 5. ... Nxe4 This is the Open variation where Black accepts the challenge and takes the unprotected pawn. 6. d4 b5 7. Bb3 d5 8. dxe5 Be6

In the Open Variation Black also obtains active piece placement, but here he pays for it with pawn weaknesses. Regardless of whether the game opens up, or the pawn structure becomes fixed - Black will have some difficulties equalizing, as both sample games illustrate: 9. Nbd2 Nc5 10. c3 d4

( It is a common mistake to exchange the white bishop too soon, as the following game illustrates: 10. ... Nxb3?! 11. Nxb3 Be7 12. Nfd4! Nxd4 13. cxd4 O-O 14. Be3 Rc8 15. Rc1 c6 16. Nc5 Bxc5 17. Rxc5 a5 18. Qc2 Bd7 19. f4 f5 20. Rf3 Qe7 21. Bd2 a4 22. Bb4 and White exerted strong pressure in Jiganchine,R-Trotchanovich,P/ Keres 2007, 1-0 )

11. Bxe6 Nxe6 12. cxd4 Ncxd4 13. a4! Be7 14. Nxd4 Nxd4 15. Ne4 Ne6 16. Be3 O-O 17. f4 and White won in Karpov,A-Korchnoi,V/Merano 1981 )

( 5. ... b5 6. Bb3 Bc5

 

This is the Moeller - Black develops the bishop to an active position, where it can become a target. The bishop will also be missing on the d8-h4 diagonal, so White's tries for advantage involve Bg5, as the sample game shows: 7. a4 Rb8 8. axb5 axb5 9. c3 d6 10. d4 Bb6 11. h3 O-O 12. Re1 Bb7 13. Na3 exd4 14. cxd4 Na5 15. Bc2 b4 16. Nb1 c5 17. Bg5 h6 18. Bh4 b3 19. Bxb3 g5 20. Nxg5 hxg5 21. Bxg5 and White had a strong attack in Hracek,Z-Shirov,A/Germany 1997, 1-0 )

6. Re1 b5 7. Bb3 d6 8. c3 O-O 9. h3 Na5

( 9. ... Bb7 10. d4 Re8 11. Nbd2 Bf8 This is the Zaitsev variation where Black puts a lot of pressure on the 'e4' pawn; against this I recommend shutting down the center on move 12 with d4-d5. When Black undermines it by c7-c6 - White plays for occupying the d5 square, or tries to use the power of his bishop on the a2-g8 diagonal. 12. d5 Nb8 13. Nf1 Nbd7 14. N3h2 Nc5 (Allowing the white bishop to remain on b3 is rather dangerous: 14. ... c6 15. dxc6 Bxc6 16. Bg5 Qc7 17. Qf3 Qb7 18. Ng3 d5 19. Ng4 dxe4 20. Qf5 with attack in Kovacevic, A-Gligoric,S/Niksic 1997, 1-0 )

15. Bc2 c6 16. b4 Ncd7 17. dxc6 Bxc6 and White started to fight for the 'd5' square in Anand,V-Kasimdzhanov,R/Mainz 2007, 1-0 )

10. Bc2 c5 11. d4 Qc7 12. Nbd2

Black is at the crossroads.

12. ... Nc6

( 12. ... cxd4 is the main line, immediately initiating play along the 'c' file. 12...Bd7 is the most popular alternative. 13. cxd4 Bb7 14. d5 Rac8 15. Bd3 Nd7 16. Nf1 Nc5 17. Ng3 Nxd3 18. Qxd3 Qc2? 19. Qxc2 Rxc2 20. Nf5 Re8 21. b3 Bc8 22. Nxe7+ Rxe7 23. Be3 Nb7 24. Bb6 Re8 25. Rec1 Re2 26. Rc7 and White won due to his domination on the 'c' file in Aseev,K-Sturua,Z/Lvov 1985, 1-0)

( 12. ... Bd7 Temporarily maintains tension in the center. 13. Nf1 Rfe8

( 13. ... cxd4 14. cxd4 Rac8 15. Ne3 Nc6 16. d5 Nb4 17. Bb1 a5 18. a3 Na6 19. b4 g6 20. Bd2 axb4 21. axb4 Qb7 22. Bd3 Nc7 23. Nc2 Nh5 24. Be3 Ra8 25. Qd2 1-0 Tal,M-Hjartarson,J/ Reykjavik 1987, 1-0 )

14. Ne3 g6 15. dxe5 dxe5 16. Nh2 Rad8 17. Qf3 Be6 18. Nhg4 Nxg4 19. hxg4 Qc6 20. g5 Nc4 21. Ng4 Bxg4 22. Qxg4 f6?! 23. gxf6 Bxf6 24. a4 +/- Fischer - Unzicker, 1959, 1-0 )

13. d5 Nd8 14. a4 Rb8

15. axb5

( 15. b4 is Geller's interpretation of this line: previously White would first exchange on b5, but that would give Black a better chance of fighting for the 'a' file. 15. ... c4 16. Nf1 Ne8 17. axb5 axb5 18. N3h2 +=

( 18. Ng3 g6 19. Nh2 Ng7 20. Rf1 Bd7?! 21. f4 Bh4 22. Qf3 f5 23. fxe5 dxe5 24. exf5 Bxg3 25. Qxg3 Nxf5 26. Qf2 Nb7 27. Ng4 h5 28. Ra6! hxg4 29. Rxg6+ Ng7 30. Rxg7+ and Black was mated in Nunn,J-Short,N/Brussels 1986, 1-0 )

18. ... f5? 19. exf5 Bxf5 20. Bxf5 Rxf5 21. Be3 Rf8 22. Nf3 +/- Geller,E-Smyslov,V/Palma de Mallorca, 1970, 1-0 )

15. ... axb5 16. b4 Nb7 17. Nf1 Bd7 18. Be3 Ra8 19. Qd2 Rfc8 20. Bd3 g6 21. Ng3 Bf8 22. Ra2 c4 23. Bb1 Qd8 24. Ba7 Ne8 25. Bc2 Nc7 26. Rea1 Qe7 27. Bb1 Be8 28. Ne2 Nd8 29. Nh2 Bg7 30. f4 f6 31. f5 g5 32. Bc2 Bf7 33. Ng3 Nb7 34. Bd1 h6 35. Bh5

with a dominating position for White in Karpov,A-Unzicker,W, Nice 1974

1-0

Training games for chess improvement – Botvinnik’s method

Mikhail Botvinnik was a big supporter of training games as a tool for the chess improvement.  He himself played a number of such games and later published some in the collection of his games. He showed how ideas developed in training games helped him to win the competitive games. In fact, Jan Timman published an entire book dedicated to Botvinnik’s training games.

As for myself, about 10 years ago I played a match of 10 training games against an opponent of roughly my strength. I lost the match by 1 point and overall it was a good experience. Both me and my opponent noticed that we were willing to take more risks than in usual tournament games. It also helped my opening repertoire to include the Open Sicilian.

Here is my analysis of one of Botvinnik’s training games: Part 1

Part 2

Preparing for an Opponent in Scid – Player Report

This is a simple walkthrough of how to use SCID to prepare for a specific opponent in your future games.
In SCID Tools –> Player Report brings up the following window:

Clicking “OK” generates the report for the selected player. Moves and themes are looks particularly interesting:

But what we mostly care about is the opening, so that’s what it looks like:

This can be printed and analyzed with the board, or you can click links and load games into SCID.
Again, SCID proves out to be a very functional chess tool that gives you your chess database essentials.

Anand on Studying Chess with Computers and Memory

I usually don’t post links to videos that were not created by myself but this video seemed particularly insightful and revealing of how the current chess world champion, Viswanathan Anand approaches opening preparation, memory and computer’s influence on the game

The video may be relevant and of interest not only to chess players but as a chess player, I especially liked Anand’s comment that a few years ago he would trust the computer saying that White is better in a given position, and later as computers get "stronger", he would trust the computer on the updated, completely opposite opinion on the same position. I believe he also implied that a few years later the computer may come up with yet another “true” evaluation. Where that leaves us as chess players is up to you to decide …

He also made a few other comments about his own preparation to tournaments, in particular that a few days before a tournament he would put the computer aside and just study chess with a board, with no engine to rely on being forced to use his own head just like in a tournament situation.

Canadian Chess Open 2012 - Lessons Learned

After a (very) long break, I played in a major swiss chess tournament – Canadian Chess Open 2012 in Victoria. I scored only 50%, which is not too great given that all of my opponents were rated lower than myself. Nonetheless, I truly enjoyed playing after such a long break. Here is what I re-learned about competitive chess yet again:

1. Studying chess at home cannot replace regular tournament practice. Practical chess strength needs constant feeding by playing in tournaments
2. Opening preparation in large Swiss Events plays a major role. Everyone does it these days! Catch opponent unaware is more important than finding a hole in their old repertoire (they will play something new to surprise you anyway, so you should not expect them to walk the same path as in previous games). This was often an issue for me, where in 3-4 games my opponents served me with opening surprises, or simply remembered established theory better than I did
3. Opening repertoire must allow for variety, both to avoid getting surprised, and also to be more flexible and work around opponent’s weak spots
4. Getting enough sleep, food, fresh air before the games is quite essential for maintaining concentration during the games
5. The tension of a big slow time controls event cannot be compared to a blitz game online, and not even to an unrated rapid one-day Sunday tournament
6. Modern time controls don’t allow you to get flagged due to increments, but you only have a chance to think deep a couple of times during the game – choose those moments wisely. Ideally you don’t have to take those deep thinking sessions right out of the opening
7. Many players avoid mainline theory in favour of choosing lines that they are familiar with. Here is what those guys played against me in this tournament:
   As White:
   1.e4 c5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d3
   1.f4
   1.g3
   As Black: 1. e4 b6
8. There are a lot of young chess players in BC who need to be watched out for!
9. One can lose a lot of rating points in a tournament, and still enjoy the experience!
10. Victoria chess organizers take running events very seriously, and want to create the best environment for competitive chess

Kasparov Defeats Grandmaster in a simul

Kasparov - Spangenberg, 1997. A good example of White's play in Queen's Gambit Accepted with an isolated pawn. This is one of the games that made 7.Bb3 the most popular line against QGA.

Fritz 13 Let’s Check Feature

Fritz 13 is adding a new feature that is called “Let’s check”. The feature allows to share engine analysis with other users and upload it to the “cloud”. Such analysis would be easy to look at in one of the Fritz panels:

The benefits of this kind of feature seem very exciting:

• it will allow fast access to all previously made engine analysis
• reduce the need to redundantly run engine on positions that someone else has analysed
• encourage sharing between chess players on an unprecedented scale
• it actually has a UI that is easy to understand. Convekta’s IDea still seems very complicated to me when I read explanations of how it works

The Video tutorials are brief and to the point:

But the scary aspects of the feature seem a lot more obvious:

• spying on each other – sounds like the option is on by default!
• in perspective, this takes us much closer to chess being completely solved
• ChessBase may control data contributed by many chess players, many engines and so on. While games are now being shared in databases produced by more than one vendor, ChessBase having billions of extra positions stored in their private databases will give them a monopoly over most of chess data, data contributed by their own users, who would now have to pay yearly membership fees to access that data.
• focus is on engine analysis, although I think this kind of system should have put emphasis on people’s verbal commentaries (Comments Network feature does seem to go in that direction though, although why not instead use existing GM comments that are spread out through their MegaBase already?)

Yes, this is just a tool to help players with what they do – use best engines to solve mysteries of various chess positions. Some would argue that this is inevitable anyway, but I find this tool more disturbing than anything else.

The biggest question I have though – for how long are they going to have enough storage space to maintain trillions of possible chess positions??

Mastering Chess Openings with John Watson

By now I have either bought or borrowed all 4 volumes of John Watson’s series “Mastering Chess Openings”. This is definitely a very special project as the author combines the nearly encyclopaedic breadth of coverage with the extensive verbal explanation and analysis of the themes behind chess openings. From reading these books one can begin to understand the inner connections between various chess openings, something that no computer opening tree is able to show right now. Typical pawn structures, piece manoeuvres, and positional themes are discussed across volumes.

Volume 4 is the last one in this impressive project.

This is an essential reading for someone who wants to both improve their opening preparation, as well as their general understanding for the game of chess. Some authors like to focus on problems of the middlegame and endgame, but John Watson definitely has a taste for the philosophy behind chess openings, so it is great that he has expressed it all in these 4 volumes. This is not a repertoire book, so you can’t build a full repertoire based on this book alone. This is also not a full encyclopaedia, as some openings are omitted (such as the Sveshnikov Variation of the Sicilian), but these series should give you a guidance on which openings you should choose. In addition to discussing particular openings Watson focuses on general themes, such as

• gambits
• pawn structure
• opening preparation in the modern age
• importance of transpositions and move orders
• reversed openings, and the role of the extra tempo

If you have read and enjoyed “Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy”, you should also enjoy “Mastering the Chess Openings”.

Getting Things Done – Studying Chess

Personal chess improvement has always been an ongoing project for me, but often without well-defined goals and somewhat obscure objectives. Just like any a complex project, it needs some structure, planning, motivation, and ability to track progress. I believe this applies to both professional chess players and to amateurs, who only have a few hours a week to dedicate to chess improvement. No one can reach perfection in chess, so everyone’s time is limited, making success dependent on how effectively we study the game.

What happens often is that while going over your game, you realize – “oh yeah, I played badly in this rook endgame, I’d better study some related endgame theory”. Another day, during a blitz game online, your opponent throws a rare variation of Scandinavian defence at you, and you realize that you had never even considered this line in your opening preparation. Again, that creates another “TODO” item that may linger in your mind for a while, but most likely won’t materialize into action on your part. I’ve heard chess players often make regretful remarks during post-mortem sessions about what they “should have, could have, would have” studied. Things we want to do to improve our chess are of broad variety, here are some more examples:

• Studying a particular opening variation
• Reading a specific book that received good reviews
• Watching an interesting chess video with player interviews
• Trying out new training software, such as Peshka
• Studying games of a particular player – such as Botvinnik
• Playing practice games in a particular opening
• Preparing for a particular tournament
• Preparing against a particular opponent, whom you often face in tournaments
• Improving your time management
• Practicing tactics
• etc

What is a good way to keep track of this kind of lingering thoughts, ideas, and make sure your best intentions for self improvement are fulfilled with some meaningful actions? Turns out chess is not a very different from any other areas that “knowledge workers” are involved in – areas where defining “What To Do?” is almost as important then the action act of “Doing”. I believe that the system known as “Getting Things Done”, advocated by David Allen should apply almost ideally to studying chess.

  Here are some of the principles of Getting Things Done approach:

• Have a system to keep track of things you need “To Do”, rather than keeping them in your head and worry about forgetting individual items
• Do regular weekly reviews of tasks, act upon them depending on your available time and energy
• Focus on tasks based on the physical contexts you are in – near computer, in transit, etc
• Manage multiple projects within the same system – chess can be one of your “projects”, and you can have multiple projects dedicated to chess improvement
• Define short term and long term goals and objectives
• Life Time – Becoming a GM
• Long Term – 3-5 years - Becoming an IM
• Short term – 6 months - Improving your openings for Black

While this system is good for anything we do in life, it is not easy to consistently follow, as I discovered myself. However personal chess study strikes me as something where this “Getting Things Done” approach could be particularly effective.

Sacrificing a Pawn for Having ‘No Bad Pieces’ – Marshall Gambit

My only tournament game against a grandmaster was played in 2004, during Canadian Closed Championship in Toronto. In the first round I got this position as Black against Kevin Spraggett, after the slightly unusual opening moves: 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Ba4 b5 5. Bb3 Na5 6. O-O Bb7 7. Nxe5 Nxb3 8.axb3 Nf6 9. Re1 Be7 10. d3 d5 11. exd5 Nxd5

White to move. Is Black’s compensation sufficient?
In my preparation, I had analysed forcing moves like 12. Qf3 and 12. Qh5. The grandmaster thought for a little bit, and played the simple 12. d3-d4. He won fairly easily after I made a judgement/tactical error at some point and my compensation went astray (I ended up down a pawn, with a bad bishop to boot). After the game he made a comment that made an impression on me; it was along the lines of “This gambit looks reasonable, Black has no bad pieces and it will be very hard for White to win. It can be a 100 moves game”. He also mentioned that similar gambits were appearing in other lines of the Spanish around the same time. I was, of course, thrilled not only to have played a game against a famous player, but also to be a given a free lecture afterwards.

  Kevin Spraggett, photo by Federació d'Escacs Valls d'Andorra

There was a lot of truth to the Grandmaster’s observations. Not surprisingly, one of the recently popular lines of the Marshall Gambit carries strong resemblance with my home grown gambit (it was really invented by my coach back in Russia who strongly believed in Black’s solid compensation in the form of two bishops and sound structure).

1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Ba4 Nf6 5. O-O Be7 6. Re1 b5 7. Bb3 O-O 8. h3 Bb7 9. d3 d5 10. exd5 Nxd5 11. Nxe5 Nd4 12. Nc3 Nxb3 13. axb3

Black to move. Two bishops and better pawn structure provide Black with compensation that grandmasters have been willing to bet on. Below is a sample game where Black’s initiative got out of hand. The two diagrams have only slight differences (the Marshall Gambit version is better for Black since he already castled and White committed to a relatively useless h2-h3 – maybe this tempo makes all the difference?). John Watson’s Mastering Chess Openings is full of such examples, where a healthy opening strategy appears in similar variations, benefiting a player with a rich opening repertoire.

Alexander Khalifman on Opening Preparation

I just watched a pretty entertaining interview with former FIDE World Chess Champion Alexander Khalifman. When asked why he made a quick draw with White against a lower rated grandmaster (who was rated 2530), Alexander the Great made a few remarks on how opening preparation works these days:

• If your opponent prepared the opening variation with Rybka, his rating is not 2530, his rating is 3000!
• There is a saying that if a grandmaster looked at the opening variation a week ago, it feels like as if he never looked at it
• Memory is the main skill that gets affected as chess players get older, or stop studying chess intensely
• Khalifman’s former strength – broad opening repertoire – is now becoming a vulnerable spot, since that requires keeping too many sharp variations in his head

The last remark definitely resonated well with myself, as I had to considerably constraint my repertoire, choose between 1.e4 and 1.d4 as White and focus my study on lines that I actually intend to play – a reasonable approach for a chess amateur. Here is the video of the interview – in Russian (which I loosely translated), recorded at the just finished Aeroflot Open

Chess Position Trainer 4 – Public Beta is out

After much anticipation, the new version of Chess Position Trainer is getting rolled out to the masses, as the program’s author announced on his blog.

First Impressions:
- It installed successfully on my Windows 7 – 64 bit machine.
- I was able to import my opening repertoire from a pgn file, and then navigate through the moves.
- The number of buttons and widgets seems to have increased dramatically since version 3, and the screenshot above shows the “Beginner Mode”!
- The “statistics” panel seems very promising. For example, after I went through one line, it showed me visually how much more of my repertoire I still have to study/review. 15 Positions reviewed, 17042 – not reviewed! A picture shows I still have a long way to go, to put it mildly…

This tool is sure to be a great New Year’s gift to chess players who use software for practising their opening skills.

Chess Position Trainer – Show Novelties

Once you created an opening repertoire in Chess Position Trainer (or imported it from elsewhere), you can cross-reference it against the database of games that you played. Here is a little walkthrough of how to use this feature.

Typically I play a lot of games on ICC, which stores all my games in a PGN file.

By using “show novelties” menu, I get a prompt for a pgn file, and then – a list of games:

Clicking on each game takes me to the position in which the game departed from my repertoire! The tool comments on what I should have played, according – to my own opening preparation

Apparently castling is premature here, but, alas, I forgot how exactly to deal with this piece sacrifice in the dragon, and did not play Nb3.

The new version of Chess Position Trainer is coming out soon, I can’t wait!

Creating Opening Repertoire in ChessBase

I already wrote about how to better manager your repertoire as well as why you need to build your repertoire in the first place, but this video (posted by “Robofriven” on ChessVideos.TV) illustrates nicely the details of doing it in a particular tool – ChessBase 9 in this case. The author also mentions Chess Position Trainer, so you definitely don’t have to be restricted to one tool; more important is that your repertoire is stored somewhere at all, and you have simple ways of it updating it.

 
http://www.chessvideos.tv/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4477

Memorizing Chess Openings

During Canadian Chess Championship in 2002, I had a pretty odd incident related to memorizing opening variations. In round 4 game I forgot my preparation literally on the next move after we entered the line I had prepared. I lost that game without putting up much resistance. In round 8 game, however, I without any particular effort played to 33rd move from my opening preparation and got a winning position, later managing to convert my advantage. How could this have possibly happened to the same player, in the same tournament?

In reality both examples had little to do with my memory being bad on one day, and good on another, but rather with how familiar I was with the ideas of each line. The line I chose in round 4 was prepared for that particular game; it was a suspicious sideline, and Black had to play carefully after violating some basic opening principles. Round 8, on the other hand, followed a line that I had played a lot with both colours in the past, and before the game I simply refreshed my memory and looked up the particulars. That being said, my round 8 opponent had also been well familiar with that line; he lost partially because he had been anticipating me to play other lines, and did not refresh this particular variation in his mind before our game. Below are the actual examples.

Glinert – Jiganchine, Richmond, 2002, Round 4 (Replay the game in the viewer, or watch a youtube video with full analysis)
Black to move
In the Panov attack, Black ventured with a very rare Qa8 and Rd8, to which White responded in a logical way with Bd2 and Ne5. I had planned to play along Krogius,N-Kortchnoi,V/Tbilisi 1966 where Kortchnoi continued with 12… Nf6, defending his kingside, and opening up the d file. I had been looking at that game several hours before the clocks were started! Instead I played 12… Nxe5?!, and lost because of difficulties getting Bc8 into the game.

Jiganchine – Sokourinski, Richmond 2002, Round 8 (Replay the fully annotated game)
  White to move
We are in the end of a somewhat forced opening/endgame variation – also in the Panov attack. Black had just finally regained a pawn with 32… Kxf3?!, but the cost is too high: his king is cut-off, and White threatens to transfer the king to d4. With the prepared (just before the game) 33. b4! White frees up the king from guarding b2, and has excellent chances to win the game.

I’d also summarize as to main reasons I think chess players have a hard time forgetting their chess openings (I am sure you can think up a few more)

1. Not familiarizing themselves with ideas, but rather trying to remember individual moves – that just never works, at least not for me!
2. Getting confused by move orders. You can even remember the ideas, but playing them in a wrong order is pretty common
3. Confusing similar variations. Often I remember that a particular move has to be played, but it actually applies to a different position with similar characteristics
4. A non-forced nature of the opening. Glinert-Jiganchine is a concrete position, but the threats have not materialized just yet.
5. Broad variety of options. In Jiganchine-Sokourinski, we got to move 33 by grabbing each other’s pawns and pieces pretty much non-stop along a narrow path. It is way harder to remember the correct path when the lines branch off in various directions