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:
- Plan Based
- Pithy
- Principled
