Evolution of chess: Popularity of openings over time

As a novice player, it's frustrating to read stories about players beating other players "by the book," i.e. they know more openings than the other player does, so they play some unexpected opening and just destroy the opponent out of the gate. I guess this is possible in just about any game, not just chess, but it seems to reduce the optimal learning process for a novice to "start memorizing things". Bah. Edit: Not that memorization is bad or boring by necessity, but finding a way to make the memorization fun and interesting is in itself frustrating, knowing that you could learn openings really fast just by brute-forcing the various lines into your brain with things like memory palace techniques.

This is an argument that is raised a lot in chess circles. While there's some truth behind it, it tends to be applicable much more in an environment where both players are trying really hard to play "in book".

Before you get too deep into openings, you should have a solid understanding of the strengths of individual pieces. This leads to a better understanding of why you'd want to put your pieces in certain places. It kind of explains the broad strokes of openings, without the little traps here and there. This is known as the Russian school of teaching.

Basically, learning from this direction, you can spend much less time studying openings. You might want to know about few common traps in common situations that you tend to use, but that's not the focus. And you'd be surprised at how well this works - barring a tiny number of games where you're caught out, your better understanding of the overall game will win out.

Essentially, overspecialising in opening repertoire at the novice level is a kind of arms race which only really works against other similar players. It's not a good long-run strategy.

The "purpose" of the opening is to get yourself into the sort of middlegame position you like to play. (Some players love having white against a French Defense, for example, while other are quite comfortable with black's side of it.) Understanding which types of positions you prefer takes experience, and while you're gaining that experience at the lower levels tactical skill can dominate. So it can seem like knowing the "book" moves for a bunch of openings is important when in fact the problem is that your opponent has better tactical skills than you or perhaps you have trouble judging a position and developing a plan. That's why specializing in a few openings can be helpful -- you get lots of practice with similar middlegame positions at the same time you limit the number of lines you have to deal with.

Now if you like open games such as the King's or Evans Gambits (i.e., fashions of 100+ years ago) things will get tactically bloody pretty quickly and so gaining a knowledge of where the booby traps are will be prudent. But if your taste runs to semi-open games, say, you can limit your opening study to a relatively small number. I happen to like the Dutch Stonewall formation as black for example, and the precise move order for getting into a position I'm comfortable with doesn't require a lot of memorization.

Happily we live in a time when computers can not only entertain us in chess but also help us with learning chess. You can improve your tactical skills by studying a tactical positions card deck in Anki for example. Or you can work on a particular opening by setting the computer to always start games from a particular position. You can use that same starting position trick to train yourself in endgame play. The important thing is to find ways to keep the game fun while you improve your play.

If you are a novice player, you really don't have to worry about this. Memorizing opening lines doesn't become an important part of the game until you are a very good tournament chess player. Until you are much better, it is far, far more important to have a general understanding of opening principles and a good eye for tactics.

This is not to say that opening study is not very important at higher levels, and if that upsets you in principle about the game, I totally understand. But it distresses me to see novices give up on chess because they are under the impression that at their level it's all about memorizing some killer opening shots.

Note that high-level Go play requires a lot of memorization too (joseki, life and death status of common shapes, etc.).

I noticed that the queen's pawn opening has grown in popularity considerably.

I don't really play chess anymore, but two decades ago, I played quite a bit. Much of the time, it was against a computer. I couldn't win. I finally found a book that really worked for me, and it taught me the "stonewall" approach, where you (playing white) advance the queen's pawn, lock up the game, and start maneuvering very tactically to restrict the movement of black's king and get a mate.

I found that this was the only way I could beat the computer - largely because it allowed me to think along a very few narrow lines (often involving a sacrifice), while the computer would get bogged down in useless searches. This was all in the late 90s, my guess is that it wouldn't work anymore.

So, I'm wondering if the surge in queen's pawn opening is the result of people being conditioned to play against computers? And it brings up another point - I've heard (man, I wish I could find a link to this theory on the web) that chess masters who lament the rise of computers actually aren't particularly bummed that computers can beat the strongest human chess players. They're bummed that the best human chess players are now playing a style that is heavily influenced by years of practice against a very specific style of opponent - a powerful computer that can't really make a "mistake". Young people have opportunities to train that never existed before, but because they don't train against stronger human players as often, some of the style of the game has been lost. I'm not (and never was) good enough at chess to know if this is true, but if anyone has an angle on it, please chime in!

Oh - by the way, a very satisfying ending here. I knew a very brilliant guy who I couldn't beat at chess in high school. After I read this "stonewall" book, I was all ready for him. I advanced queen's pawn, all read to lock it down and take away his advantage. He simply advanced his king's pawn, basically telling me, go ahead and take it. The wide open game against an inferior opponent was worth far more to him than a pawn.

Good for him, though not so good for me ;) That's the kind of thing you do when you're experienced playing against people rather than computers.