September 1995 at the age of 19 years old I played my very first rated game for national rating. This is meanwhile 25 years ago but I remember that even in those early days I was already preparing my games. Obviously it was still very basic as I didn't have much information about my opponents and the engines were very weak. Today a lot has changed. Not only the tools are totally different but I also know much better now how to prepare properly for a game. I guess that in the last decades I've prepared for more than 1000 opponents.
Over the years I discovered that many players (most amateurs ?) at some point in their career stop playing mainlines and switch to smaller systems. That is not a surprise. As I wrote a few weeks ago here, adults have much less time for studying chess compared to children. Children have lots of school-holidays and very few responsibilities. For an adult it is often impossible to and have a full time job and take care of a household and keep track of all important developments in chess. This is also the reason why some players prefer to stop playing competitive chess as they don't like playing at a lower level. On the other hand by choosing cleverly your little systems, it is still possible even without having much time for chess to enjoy playing it.
Nevertheless the Chessbase-article Siem Van Dael unorthodox openings lead to success surprised me. End of last year I had played against Siem a very long theoretical line of the Svechnikov and this time he did exactly the opposite with openings like 1.h4, 1.a4, 1.h3, 1.a3 and 1.g3 g6 2.Bg2 Lg7 3.Na3. The lad is only 16 years old and it looks like he is fed up of studying openings. That is very young but maybe he is just rebelling. At home I also have 2 teenagers which prefer to ignore my advise. On the other hand the best school is always the one which allows you to make your own mistakes.
With this introduction I want to return to the end of my previous article. I concluded that I wanted to focus my new study on openings played by the strongest players. It must also be openings which I can expect in standard games on the board. I guess the bongcloud is a bridge too far but it is clear that some players are daring to play some very unorthodox openings. On the other hand if you look at any database then you see that the number of standardgames starting with 1.h4, 1.a4 ... is very low. Also we have to manage our time wisely and therefore it seems more appropriate to give priority at openings which are played more frequently.
Also every player will in almost any game get to a moment in which there must be played without any prior knowledge. An experienced player should be able to handle a new non critical opening by just following the basic-rules of the opening. Besides the biggest danger of openings consists of critical lines of which a lack of foreknowledge will create a serious handicap. In this article I will show a few of those examples.
My final restriction is to chose openings of critical lines which I haven't studied recently. With recently I mean in the last 5 years. I realize there is an enormous amount of openings which need to be analyzed and then it makes sense to prioritize the unknown systems. So even with all those filters I still managed to select 3 out of 10. In the remaining part of this article I will elaborate 2 out of 3 to demonstrate how great this for me new method of studying chess is.
We start with a line of which I initially thought that black blundered a piece to discover later that this line not only has been tried out in about 50 master-games but also scores very well in practice. The young Turkish international master Omer Faruk Ozer defeated me spectacularly in below game.
Later I detected in my personal database that I had lost another game in this line against the famous Alexsur81, one of the most active and strongest players on lichess. I try to shield my accounts but of course it is fun to know who exactly uses an account. Here it wasn't really difficult to find out that the Russian grandmaster Aleksei Priodorozhni plays with the username Alexsur81. It even becomes more interesting when we discover that Aleksei also dared to play this opening recently in a standard game on the board.
Aleksei lost this game but he had definitely chances. I assume he studied this opening seriously as he regularly plays it on lichess with success. I don't know if I will encounter this opening later on the board but I wasn't surprised to get quickly the opportunity online to test my analysis of this opening. Aleksei has almost 4000 followers so one can expect that some of them try to copy his repertoire. I believe that the next game played on just 3 minutes KO against a 2440 elo rated opponent wasn't bad.
The second example concerns a line which is already 15 years part of my repertoire and which I regularly encounter online (about 60 times). I have never studied it as in a standard-game nobody yet tried it out against me. Anyway I was mainly concerned about the setup chosen by the Russian FM Kirill Kopjonkin. This was also confirmed by my engine as it seems I always replied in the past (7 times already) wrongly.
So today I know that 13.Na4 is much stronger than 13.fxe6 which was previously always the move I played online. I also want to add that I didn't only study this one amelioration of this line. When I look at an opening then I also look at the alternatives for black and that was immediately rewarded in the next online games. In the next weeks I won very easily against 3 + 2400 rated players in this opening thanks to the new acquired knowledge.
Of course it won't be so simple in a standard game but I am convinced that my study will help me to play this opening more accurately.
Also I noticed that this new method of study is much quicker and more efficient than the way I worked before the corona-crisis. I don't spend any time anymore at the middle-game or endgame. I fully focus on the openings and on top only the real critical lines. I see immediately my results in those lines improving (for now of course only online). In 5 weeks I managed to finish the study of already 11 different openings which is twice as much as I do normally.
There are plenty of games I can use to continue for quite some time. Meanwhile I keep playing online so that the new knowledge can be tested and other/ new problems can be discovered. It is just a matter of finding the right opponents for it but that will be the last and final part of my new method of working with online games. Which online games (tempo/ tournaments/...) should we play and where can we find the best players online to find optimally new materials for the study?
Brabo
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