Mastered the Basics? Then You're a Master

Whenever you learn a new activity, you will hear "study the basics" a lot, with "the basics" being the most important and fundamental skills.  Frequently, these are not sexy and even dull, such as artists drawing hundreds of boxes or musicians endlessly drilling their scales. There's nothing artistic about a cube or musical about a scale, but these form the necessary foundation that mastership can be built on.

And if you get good enough, even the basics become beautiful.

Source: https://conceptartempire.com/drawabox-lessons-review/

I have a blackbelt in karate.  Do you know how I stand out from a beginner?  It's not so much that I have "secret karate skills" that a white-belt hasn't learned.  Rather, I do the basics really well, and most blackbelt classes spend most of their time drilling the basics.  Indeed, most advanced karate skills are just the basics done in a certain way or with a slight variation.  After all, at the end of the day, there's only so many ways you can punch and kick someone.

This applies to chess.  Unlike karate, though, the basics of chess are truly vast.  Simply listing the basics will make this one of my longest blog posts.  Actually learning all of this will take even longer.  If you can do it, though, if you can truly internalize all of the basics, then there's a strong argument you are approaching master status.  Like a blackbelt, a chess master doesn't rely on "secret chess skills" to win so much as they do the basics really, really well.

Let's take a look at the chess basics.

Why I Never Played the Standard Beginner Openings

 If you are a beginner, you have probably heard the standard advice: "As Black, play 1.e4 e5, with a standard Italian or Spanish, and 1.d4 d5, playing the QGD against the Queen's Gambit."  These principled choices lead to stable yet rich positions where the basic principles will do you very well.  It makes a lot of sense... and I did not follow it.  Young Smithy did the exact opposite, actually.

I have mostly complete stats from when I was a kid up to the point in the mid-2010s when I started taking chess seriously again. Out of just under 900 Black games, here are the first move breakdowns:

Lots to dive in here (such as I have nearly played more Sicilians than I have against 1.d4 in its totality), but I should start with an immediate caveat: a lot of these games were thematic tournaments.  The King's Gambit, the Evans Gambit, the Max Lange, the Albin, a lot of these games started in set positions.  I loved playing these wild and open positions, so I signed up every chance I could.  I have no easy way of filtering these games out, so here's my best attempt: count how many times I reached the standard Italian (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 and not the Evans or Max Lange) and QGD (1...d5, 2...e6, 3...Nf6 and 4...Be7) positions.  These are the results:

The results?  I basically never played the standard openings.  I have one Italian (where I played 4.d3 f5!?, so not even a standard Italian!), two Spanish (both Berlins), and zero (!) QGD (though I did play the Cambridge Springs, which is a similar structure).  In my formative years, where I went from 1300 to 1800 in online correspondence chess, I did not play any of the standard openings.

Here's why.

Should Beginners Play the Sicilian?

 The Sicilian: it's what all the cool kids play.  It's the sharpest, most dynamic, most aggressive reply to 1.e4.  It has the best stats, the best win-rate, the fewest draws ... and the most theory.  A single inaccuracy, a slip in move order, leads to crushing attacks ... for either side.  It's probably the most interesting opening in all of chess.

So the question becomes, should beginners be playing the Sicilian?

At the risk of sounding like a lawyer, this will depend on what we mean by "beginner," "should", "play" and "the Sicilian."  I'm going to examine each one.  It will be more interesting than it sounds, I promise.

The Basics of Planning

 There are few things more frustrating in chess than not knowing what to do.  Take this position:

We're Black and we have a nice position: White's played a non-critical line, we have the two Bishops, equal space and no real weaknesses... but what do we do next?  Maybe ...Bg4?  But after White plays h3, we either exchange, losing the Two Bishop advantage, or retreat and likely end up on g6, where we stare at White's pawn wall.

That's not great.  Maybe ...Be6?  Okay, definitely a better spot for that Bishop, but now our Rook is blocked and our Bd6 is stuck defending e5 like a pawn.  That's not ideal, either.

Hmm, maybe we can ask a different question: which side of the board should we plan on?  We have more space on the Queenside, so maybe we keep pushing those pawns.  That looks decent.  The Kingside might also be an option: ...Nh4 and ...Bc5 create pressure, and maybe ...Bg4 now provokes some weaknesses.  That also looks tempting... but should I be doing any of these while most of my pieces are undeveloped?

This thought process goes round and round.  It's easy to get bogged down and never get anywhere.  We have an abundance of options that all look equally plausible.  Sometime we don't even recognize the options and we draw complete blanks. We stare at the board and nothing comes up.  We have no plan.

I would like to offer a solution, or at least a partial one.  When in doubt, focus on the most essential things.  These might not be "perfect" but are very rarely wrong.  From there, we can slowly add in more complex concepts.  Treat this as a basic introduction to planning.

Checklist for a Beginner's Opening Repertoire

Every beginner has heard this a thousand times: don't worry about opening theory, just learn opening principles.  That's great and all, and it's true ... but then you sit down at a game and have no idea what to do next.  It's literally move two and you are thinking on your own.  Is that really the right approach?

Of course not.  Having no repertoire is silly, but so is the other extreme, spending dozens of hours learning detailed theory.  There has to be a happy middleground, and there is.  I'm going to lay-out the elements of an ideal beginner's repertoire.  If a particular resource doesn't check all of these boxes, then it's probably not for beginners:

1. Plan Based
   
2. Pithy
   
3. Principled

Learning Plans and Ideas

In chess, there are few things worse than not having a plan.  Every move is a struggle. We agonize over every decision, wondering if we are on the right track. Typically we drift, jumping from one idea to the next, with no consistency in our moves.  It's terrible.

When you have a plan, though, then life is easy.  Just follow the plan.  If we are doing a Queenside minority attack, well, then every move should address that.  Simple. We know exactly what we are supposed to do. Sure, we still have to calculate and evaluate and all that hard stuff, but our plan guides our thinking.  Having one is much better than the alternative.

This guy probably knows what he is talking about.

Okay, so we're probably in agreement, knowing plans (and their associated ideas) is ideal ... but how do we learn these?  Every pawn structure has its own general plans, and every opening brings its own nuances. How do you go about learning these?

I will provide three options.  Two of them are quick and easy.  The last one takes work, but it may be the best of the bunch ... assuming you can put in the work.

1. Free Resources
2. Paid Resources
3. Self Study