How do i properly study an opening? should i use engines? should i analyze the variations myself? should i read a book or watch an online lesson?
i can't understand the study point too...
Get some good material (books, videos, maybe chessable stuff) and understand. Use what suits best for you.
And then doing analyze more and more yourself. If one opponent plays a new move or you ask yourself what to do if he plays that move, analyze yourself.
And then doing analyze more and more yourself. If one opponent plays a new move or you ask yourself what to do if he plays that move, analyze yourself.
Do not study openings at all: general principles suffice at your level. Train tactics and study endgames instead, it will reward you more. Openings rarely have an influence on the outcome of the game. If you are not convinced, then set up an opening you think is particularly bad and then play the good side of it against Stockfish. All opening study just postpones the moment when you have to start thinking for yourself. Just play the same way all the time, so that you can accumulate experience. Play the opening slowly: think about what you want to achieve and why. This will help you in the middle game as you will understand the position you built yourself and as you reach a state of concentration.
@ivn2k To better appreciate @tpr's point of view (which I share) just randomly analyze games of players of different ratings, right on up to 2 000 on this platform. You will then realize how ubiquitous game-changing egregious mistakes and blunders are in most games of chess. Their frequency diminishes as you go up the rating ladder, but they persist nonetheless. And that is why the "advantage" is, more often than not, prone to wild fluctuations within a single game at lower level rankings. Something you don't so easily run across at "Class A" and above ratings.
In other words, the "incremental" advantage "opening knowledge" gives lower-level players is far outstripped by the advantage they get from a similarly rated opponent's inability to see a game-winning tactic or having committed a game-losing egregious mistake or blunder because he/she lacks an understanding of chess principals and fundamentals or because they don't have a handle on simple "impulse control". The last of which being something I still struggle greatly with, even though I only play slow time controls...
It therefore follows that spending a lot of time on openings rather than on tactics or even endgames is a sub-optimal use of a lower-rated player's limited study-time. This general statement doesn't hold as much when playing very fast time-controls such as bullet and blitz where good opening knowledge is an essential component of efficient time-management but that particular skill-set is extrinsic to the "art of chess" or "searching for the best move" when time is taken out of the equation.
In other words, the "incremental" advantage "opening knowledge" gives lower-level players is far outstripped by the advantage they get from a similarly rated opponent's inability to see a game-winning tactic or having committed a game-losing egregious mistake or blunder because he/she lacks an understanding of chess principals and fundamentals or because they don't have a handle on simple "impulse control". The last of which being something I still struggle greatly with, even though I only play slow time controls...
It therefore follows that spending a lot of time on openings rather than on tactics or even endgames is a sub-optimal use of a lower-rated player's limited study-time. This general statement doesn't hold as much when playing very fast time-controls such as bullet and blitz where good opening knowledge is an essential component of efficient time-management but that particular skill-set is extrinsic to the "art of chess" or "searching for the best move" when time is taken out of the equation.
This topic has been archived and can no longer be replied to.