Opening Essentials: How to Understand an Opening

Chess players love learning new openings.  The usual process is to look it up online (or to buy one of the endless courses available) and then to study variations.  This, though, has a relatively low success rate.  Sure, if you are lucky enough to get your exact variation in game, great, but if not, you are left high and dry.  Learning raw variations, by itself, rarely works.

2.h3.  Now what do I do?

The canned response is to say you need to "understand the moves" you are playing ... but what does that really mean?  Sure, I'll learn the plans and ideas ... but which plans? What ideas?  How do I know which plans are important, and how do I use those ideas to help me when I face 2.h3?

Here's my suggestion.  Rather than this vague "understand the moves", you need to know three critical things:

1. What do you do if your opponent does nothing? (eg, what is your dream scenario)
2. What do you do if your opponent tries to kill you? (eg, what is the most aggressive option)
3. What do you do against your opponent's main thematic plan? (eg, what is your opponent trying to do)

That's it.  If you can answer these three questions, then you can play your opening against just about anything with total confidence. Conversely, if you don't know these, then you don't know your opening, regardless of how many moves you've memorized or Chessable reviews you've done.  THIS is opening understanding.

Knowledge, Skill and Deliberate Practice in Chess

How do you get better at math?  Thinking back to grade school, two things stand out.  First, lots of time memorizing the times tables.  Two times two is four, three times two is six, etc.  I think that's all we did in Grade 4, honestly.  More than that, though, we did hundreds if not thousands of practice problems, and test day was basically just more practice problems done in a formal setting.  Learning the times tables made it easier, but at the end of the day, getting better at math was mostly about ... doing more math.

Let's now flip the script: how do you get better at chess?  Two things stand out.  First, there is a wealth of chess content that teaches us something about chess: openings, endgames, concepts, ideas, traps, the list goes on and on.  I call this, broadly speaking, chess knowledge.  Second, we can take what we know and apply it: playing games, analyzing, calculating puzzles, that sort of thing.  For lack of a better term, I call this chess skill.

More than just nomenclature, I believe this is a crucial concept for improvement.  Indeed, it may be the most important element when it comes to improving.  I think the majority of players, and I point to myself here, spend far too much time on knowledge acquisition when  we should be focusing on building our skill.

The Three Pillars of Chess Ability

What determines a player's strength?  Said differently, what makes a good player different from a weaker one?  Fundamentally, better players find better moves, and they do it more consistently.  Easy enough, but that begs the question: how do you find good moves?  What determines chess skill?

This is a huge question with many different subtleties, but I think it breaks down into three broad areas: there's understanding (knowing what to do generally), there's pattern recognition (seeing ideas without effort), and there's calculation (seeing ideas with effort).  Taken together, these pillars make up most if not all of your chess ability, so let's dive in and take a closer look.

Inside, I will look at each pillar: what it is, how it helps and how to improve it.  I also warn what happens if we rely on one too much.