"Should I play different openings to confuse opponents" You play them like randomly on the site. Its not like they will KNOW how you play. You cant really confuse them.
So, we often say stick to one opening so you play to your strenghts, because if you play something else "just to confuse" some one you have not played before, you will probably wont be able to display your most solid opening.
But the "stick to one opening" does not mean you have to play like a robot the exact same opening regardless what the opponent does, it means, get a wide repertoire, if you play e4 and they play e5, scotch, gioco piano or whatever your choice is. If they play e6, have an anti french, if they play c5, have an anti sicilian. Stick to those openings you chose and play them exclusively when you get the appropriate lines. Over time you are going to be very good when playing against those openings because you will learn their intention, traps, tactical themes as whatnot. But if you try new stuff, you wont have much success on the long term (unless you stick to those openings, which is the advice people are giving you to begin with).
Don't play the French. I used to play it and I enjoyed it. Very straightforward logical gameplan. But then I got to a level where most of my opponents know the best ways to play against it and in many games, as the middlegame matured, I found myself with technically equal material, but practically playing down a piece; the french bishop. I'm sure the opening is completely playable, but toward the end I felt like I was getting bad positions more often than not.
As others have said, if you're just playing online, it's no problem to play the same opening all the time. But if you want to learn a different opening, and maybe throw your opponent off, don't learn the sicilian. Players will encounter the sicilian about as much as e4e5, so they will know how to deal with it. If you really want to surprise your opponents, play something they rarely see, like the modern, the pirc, or alekhine's defense.
There are many surprising variations within the Sicilian.
Taimanov, Kan, Dragondorf, (Hyper-)Accelerated Dragon (which makes the Jugoslav Attack bad for white), O'Kelly, Nimzowitsch,...
and there are even sub variations in some of those
#11 In other words, switching too much might confuse everyone around the board, including yourself.
I notice the introduction of "wide repertoire", this rings something to my ear. I view that as complementary to the notion of similarity position configuration (static or perhaps also dynamic, for how to get there or how they evolve).
To invoke width, in an otherwise metric-less** opening tree, means you have some internal sense, and possibly some communicable arguments either from chess theory or geometrical application of the basic objective rules of chess (mainly motion of chess material on the board), which would be explaining your suggestion above:
"scotch, gioco piano or whatever your choice is. If they play e6, have an anti french, if they play c5, have an anti sicilian"
Now that is not 1 opening, only. Would you answer why you consider this a wide essential repertoire, in some new thread I would name "What is width in an opening repertoire", starting and possibly having discussion about your example, possibly others would propose other arguments?
I would also consider the notion of covering of (not the board, but) the set of possible positions populating all the current chess opening "theory", games or truncated sequences, or some diverse aspects of those sequences based on position content and kinetics (or dynamics).
First wide. and then widest.
unless the op does not mind. I don't obviously. I just don't think many participants would happen. but i would like to be proven wrong (as always, because that is how progress is made).
** unless you count the number of moves that separated 2 positions from their common ancestor position: the root where 2 openings emerge from. That basic distance would be called the hamming distance for discrete sets. It does not have any chess meaning like the ECO or any opening name have any meaning other than to identify the opening sequence. It tells only of tempo, if you want to stretch the limit of meaning, not material, not positional features (i.e. non-material).
