If you had a friend – or a pupil – who was just starting to play competitive chess, what openings would you advise them to play?
To the best of my understanding, the old Soviet system required you to start with gambit play. You’d choose the King’s Gambit with white, and meet 1. e4 with e5, again choosing a gambit continuation. The theory was that you need to develop your tactical skill first, and the best way to do that is to play openings leading to positions with fluid piece play. Positional play would come later, once tactics had been mastered.
About 15 years ago I started meeting young players who had been taught, often by East European coaches, a very different opening repertoire. They’d meet 1. e4 with something like the Caro-Kann or the Scandinavian, and they’d perhaps play the Colle or London System with White. One idea, I suppose, was that if you lose quickly by overlooking a tactic it will be pretty disheartening. There are certainly many ways Black can lose very quickly in the Caro-Kann, so you still have to be careful.
Now it’s so easy to spend as long as you like every day doing online tactics training, you may well argue that novices could learn positional chess from practical experience along with feedback from their coach, while learning tactics from spending an hour or so a day solving online puzzles.
Another approach would be to learn an opening like the Stonewall, which you can play in all your games with white and against anything other than 1. e4 with black. Again this would be something designed to avoid losing your games quickly while you were practising your tactics elsewhere.
On the other hand you might think that your friends or students need to gain experience playing different types of pawn formation, rather than becoming really good at one specific pawn formation. They should learn to play both open and closed positions. Only with that experience will they be able to make good decisions as to what sort of opening suits them best.
Any of these approaches might be better than the openings most children used to play in primary school chess clubs: dull Italian or Spanish Four Knights Games. The openings appear to be easy to play, but it’s much harder to play the middlegame because it’s not easy for either side to play a central pawn break, so they just end up with stodgy positions.
There’s no one good answer, because chess is such a complex game and there’s so much to learn if you want to play it well. A good tutor working at this level will be flexible and provide impartial advice. Different students will be suited by different approaches, depending on their style of play, their personality, their temperament, their maturity, how much time they have available for study, what type of study they prefer and much else.
Many years ago (it was so long ago I did it on my old BBC Micro) I wrote an outline of five possible opening repertoires which Richmond Junior Club members might want to use. It no longer exists, but perhaps I should revive the idea at some point.
But, tell me, what do you think the most suitable openings are for players graduating to competitive chess (say rated in the region of 1000-1500)?
Perhaps I’ll write more about this another time.
Richard James
