I often see people recommending to beginners not to worry about memorising all the lines of an opening, but instead to learn the main ideas / goals of an opening. This makes sense to me. But I haven't yet come across any particularly good resources at explaining the main ideas of openings.
Can anyone recommend any good websites that explain in plain English what the main ideas and goals are for particular openings?
Cheers,
Dave.
Unfortunately, despite many advices about this, no opening book explains these ideas. You have to use a database, sort the right games with the right openings, seeing how theses games end, looking for the strategical ideas in these specific openings. Too much work for a serious but casual player.
Many books give variations only, and some famous games. Sometimes some ideas about square controls.
And they explain the opening until the 20th move !
So, as
@DaveCromer ask : which site ( or book) ?
The book I used, back in the Dawn of Time, was Suetin's "Modern Chess Opening Theory". Lots of principles, no variation tree to drill. It was about 20 years old then, but the ideas were still sound. But I didn't find it useful until I was above 1500 OTB. I suspect it would be difficult to find these days.
You could try something like SmithyQ's "Smithy's Opening Fundamentals" over on Chessable. It is one of their free courses.
yes. I would even propose, a table inversion from ECO to Ideas. Have some solid categorization of ideas (types of ideas, static, short time scale, long time scale, positional features), and then group the ECO within that table, grid, or web of ideas.
There used to be some notions about open middles games or closed middle games as corollaries to very first opening moves, but then one had to add term like "semi", and when it turned out that a bush exploration from such first moves end up sizable sub-bush into the complement of the idea (close vs open, if was closed, then finding out a bunch can be steered to open, or vice-versa, may need to check, this has been an impression of mine), then I think some TM superscript appeared in the ECO nomenclature so that one would keep using either the closed or open (with TM), and nobody's cognitive dissonance would be heard, as TM does not have any meaning, more like a proper name... Am I wrong?
So yes, it would be nice if there would be systematic treatment of openings with ideas as the reference system, not so much with tree branch are the neighbours (not forgetting that information, but not making it the table of content)...
we had ECO as solid address system to name openings and catalogue them by their branching only, AND then some sparse ideas peppered when some authors would feel generous, and perhaps would get tired of writing SAN sequences, as variations.
Unless we are wrong and have not carefully scanned the reading materials, about openings. But with the idea of "repertoire" and how they are defined from ECO address not really by type of games (or idea groupings of openings). Then, please tell us wrong, with some good references where such effort has been at the forefront.
I guess, maybe the notion of idea itself needs work, as it is hard to make a grid or another controllable data structure based of tree of positions connected by 1 and only one legal half move (the edges of the tree are those).
But that could be worked out, it could be iterated, or some subset temporarily agreed upon, and then use that as analytic grid to regroups many openings. see what subset makes more sense... discuss... let some solid internally consistent emerge after a while. or start with open and close and reshuffle the ECO as target addresses to fit under those ideas partitions.
Table of content having ideas as entries.
I would recommend the book logical chess move by move. It is not directly an opening book, but somehow it explains the basics of the main openings, and a plus, the middlegame as well. I am looking as well for a good opening book. Have fun.
Just go to the lichess database and go through your preferred openings and its tree. Take notes. You will start seeing that the same ideas appear in most openings, just different move orders. Then realize that a move order ALLOWS you to realize the goal of your opening faster or slower. Say your opponent for instance plays a3, a move that isn't usual in your specific opening. Well, then you can afford playing Nc6 instead of Ndb7 for example.
Open any database , Put your opening position on the board . Set minimum rating to 2400 . Going through hundreds of games with not more than 2-3 minutes on one game will give you firm idea of plans and general ideas of any middle game position .
Moskalenko's books are full of ideas, tricks and weapons.
So first the tree, then the ideas. I did read about move order above, that would put many openings on different tree branches, should that discard all the books with a specific move at 1. (letter X digit) in their title? Surely if they start like that, they might miss a bunch of such defined openings but with different first move (half-move), having the same ideas nonetheless.
I would find learning value in having a global view of various first half-moves which share (or not) the sames ideas..... It would put me on some road to understanding things faster, than having only a microscope as a telescope.
Reuben Fine's book, The Ideas Behind the Chess Openings, is a classic in this vein - lots of explanation of the motivations for the moves, including nice things like "ideal positions" for one side or the other, ie the position that they'd like to get if their opponent played halfway sensibly but a bit too passively. The only downside is that it's now about 80 years out of date, and a lot of the evaluations of lines have changed - he makes a point of the Berlin Defence being distinctly inferior to a6 lines in the Ruy Lopez, for instance, and barely mentions e5 Sicilians because he considers them to be positionally unplayable.
I'd love to see an updated version adapted by a modern GM, but there's still a lot to learn even in the original.
Pawn structure books like Chess Structures by Rios can also be helpful. And the occasional opening book that happens to be written the right way.
Other than that, I've picked up some good stuff from Youtube videos - Caleb Denby for St Louis Chess Club, some of the Chess Dojo stuff - but there isn't a particularly consistent source.
