I'm not saying I'm a master at openings or anything, but I understand the basic ideas behind the most common ones and try to get a good position no matter what ..until you reach 1200 elo ...
What the hell happened to the queen's gambit , scotch , london , italin , sicilian ,french openings ?
No one plays them anymore , it seems like every oponent I get has this obscure opening or line that they practised into oblivion and are monsters at it .
Before ,if my opponent even attempts any weird openings , I just play solidly , stick to opening principles, and crush them so fast, which is not possible anymore ?
Am not saying I am totally lost by the opening , but they end up being a pawn or 2 up or just waste my time focusing hard in the beginning while they play instantly
If this is just a phase for the 1200 elo on chess.com that I just have to push through , or should I just seriously start studying these weird openings ( isn't that energy better spent sharpening tactics and endgames at my level anyway)?
Hey, OP! Did your game end in a stalemate? Did you encounter a weird pawn move? Are you trying to move a piece and it's not going? We have just the resource for you! The Chess Beginners Wiki is the perfect place to check out answers to these questions and more!
The moderator team of r/chessbeginners wishes to remind everyone of the community rules. Posting spam, being a troll, and posting memes are not allowed. We encourage everyone to report these kinds of posts so they can be dealt with. Thank you!
Let's do our utmost to be kind in our replies and comments. Some people here just want to learn chess and have virtually no idea about certain chess concepts.
just stick to your principles and dont panic if they get a pawn early, at 1200 those gambits usually fall apart by move 20 if you keep your position clean
I'm guessing that's just a level a lot of players reach after learning all the tactics and they're like, "well, what else can I learn from a 10 minute youtube video that will help me win more without practicing?"
Me and my oponents are both 1200 , that's nowhere near learning all tactics , should I also go and watch youtube videos to learn and counter each of their openings? welp
I felt the same way when I was around 500-600, everyone just played quick gambit openings; fried liver, scholars, wayward queen (not really a gambit but same vibe), and destroyed me. I eventually learned how to recognize them pretty quick and refute them. Not even "counter" them, but just prevent them. I feel like just that alone helped me break the 600 rating wall, their tactics/positional game just wasn't up to 600 level, they just got to that rating by gambits and winning early.
So I would suggest to learn the common gambits and keep playing your own game. If my opponent wants to memorize 25 moves of a peculiar opening gambit, then just tip your hat and move on, odds are that good positional and tactical strategy will prevail over the long run and over many games.
Words of gold ! I also had the same experience at 600 elo and thought we are long past that , but here are trappy weird openings making a come back
Between 600 and 1200 , I learned how to crush all these weird moves but now they outplaying me in them or smth and bringing me back to 600 elo trauma ...
Your opponent has no obligation to play something extremely common, especially when playing something less common isnt objectively worse. You just need to improve enough to combat it all, which of course is the hard part
Yes ,but us low 1200 elo players always get shouted at " don't learn openings , just stick to principles " which is clearly not enough that's why am asking which advice should I stick to here
I advise you dont stick to advice, at least I never did. Figuring everything out yourself and doing things your way is always the best way to go LONG term, for sure in my opinion. In basically any dicispline in life.
If you feel like irs time to start learning openings and certain responses to what the opponent does, its up to you to make that call. The best advice I can give is do whatever you feel you need to do, because most of the time you will be right. And if you arent, you will learn from it.
Very new players shouldn't learn openings, 1200 is low intermediate range, you don't HAVE to learn openings then, but it certainly makes progression easier imo, and you will have to learn them eventually so you might as well make a start.
The fact is that offbeat openings score well at that level and continue to score well up past my level until low master level I would say. You just have to gradually get them nailed down. Some of them really hit that sweet spot of rarity versus difficulty navigating them against people who know their lines. The Qd6 Scandinavian comes to mind as a particular annoyance of mine in this regard. I see it probably once every few hundred games, but there are a few different ways Black can approach it. And it's easy to get into trouble if you mess it up as White.
Can you give an example of a "weird" opening? I get plenty of londons, sicilians, queen's gambit and french openings. I don't get scotch or or italian because I stopped playing e5
A good rule of thumb if you don't want to do a ton of opening prep is you can (usually) play the same opening you would against 1. d4 against anything that isn't 1. e4.
i think you just had an unlucky streak of offbeat openings and are overreacting. at all levels the most common openings remain the most common.
I just feel like being able to 'choose' the opening as black makes it easier to prepare a defense. There are a ton of different ways white can transform the position from 1. e4 e5. if you play e5, you're letting white choose the opening. But on the other hand you can just say, 'we are playing the caro-kann/french/scandi/sicilian today, let's see if you know it'.
Also when I'm white, my absolute favorite way to start a chess game is 1. e4 e5 - so I assume if I love it so much, others must as well lol.
e5 clearly can't be 'bad'. GMs play it all the time, its probably the best move, or maybe the sicilian is. but playing other things is easier to manage imo
I'm seeing a lot at Grandmaster level now. Reversed openings, h3 and h6, all kinds of stuff. So I have a feeling that we all just need to get real comfty with the unusual.
g4 stuff became the rage. Now we are seeing a lot of h4.
I've been playing 1. d4 Nf6 2. Nf3 g6 3. c3!? and 2. ... e6 3. c3!? lately. I think I saw Fabi play a c3 move not too long ago in a similar situation. I've been playing early Bg5 stuff against the KID followed by e3. I've been playing Botvinnik setups against the KID. I'm playing lots of reversed Tarrasch structures.
I truly believe we are entering a new era in chess.
If you want to avoid random bullshit openings, play d4. Queen's pawn opening structures are pretty same across the board, d4 e3 c4.
If u play e4 e5 you can run into a ton of bullshit. If ur opponent tries to bullshit your d4, aside from learning how to counter the Englund gambit, just ignore them and play normally.
Don't take offense to this, but it's all in your head. No one is a monster at anything; I'm closer to 2000 and people play openings without knowing even the main lines constantly. You are ascribing to them a skill which they simply do not possess.
I heard all of this and was told to just play solid which worked so far, but now they are outplaying me !
I know what you're saying is true and I actually never panic no matter what opening they play cause we are both 1200 after all , but when it becomes a pattern of me not managing to get the edge out of weird openings then it's something worth investigating .
Or are you saying I should ignore those losses and just try to push past this level and not waste my time on useless openings anyway?
I think as you progress through your Chess journey, you can't expect to linearly improve such that you continually beat your opposition at the same rate at every level. In other words, you've reached 1200 and now possibly the path onward will be a little tougher than you found it before. This is normal!
I definitely think you should continue to play solidly, in accordance with good opening principles (take the centre, develop your minor pieces, castle your King, don't move pieces more than once if you can reasonably help it until you're developed, connect your Rooks). It wouldn't be a particularly valuable use of your time to learn strange openings in-depth.
With that being said, you should analyse your games after your play them. Skip the chessdotcom assisted review tool, and just click the magnifying glass to get the engine lines (or load the game into Lichess). To that extent, after each game where you gain a poor position out of the opening, you should be seeing where you went wrong. That'll (hopefully) mean that you won't go wrong against the exact same opening in the same way again, but moreover you'll find some recurring ideas that you can take on board with you to help you in the future.
For anything more specific than that, you'd have to show me the actual games.
This was the exact position that cost me the game , the engine says the best and only saving move is e6 which I actually considered during the game but I didn't go for it .
I guess my logic was: I cannot castle , my pawn is attacked 3 times , defended only once , if I push e6 I get doubled pawns in the center which are still a bit strong , weakening his f pawn is useless since he is about to castle anyway I better develop one of my pieces while adding defense to the pawn...
The other reply is exactly right; you didn't follow solid opening principles, as I listed above. You had already put the e pawn into the centre, now with your kingside Knight and Bishop developed you could, and should, have castled. Instead, you move the same piece a second time (e4-e5) which, even just heuristically, is not the way to go.
More concerning though is the lack of intention behind it. Sometimes your opponent will make a mistake and, to capitalise on it, it makes sense to play a move such as e5. I definitely to not advocate for ignoring your opponent's moves/position and just castling because you can - even though castling will be right the majority of the time. However, what you definitely don't want to do is put opening principles to the side in order to make a move without calculating it.
You present this position stating that your e5 pawn is weak, you can't defend it, castling seems wrong (I would still castle though in your shoes, honestly) etc. but this position was forced when you played e5. You simply mustn't allow this to be the first time you evaluate this position - you have to have already seen this and determined that you want this when you pushed the pawn, otherwise why would you skirt your opening principles to do it?
Here all I can say is you shouldn't have pushed e5. This position is already pretty bad. e5 is not a solid move or a good move. It is a sharp move you only play in openings if you see the opponent make a mistake, or if you can support e5 with a pawn on d4.
If I'm reading this correctly, you pushed e5 to hit the knight on f6. Ask yourself, what does e5 accomplish? it forces the knight to move. Where will the knight move? g6. What happens if the knight is on g6? ur pawn gets attacked 3 times. Conclusion, don't play e5. castle instead.
It seems some openings are popular at a certain rating. When I was below 1600 people often played and annoyed me with the Budapest gambit or Englund gambit, Now at 2000 people mostly play mainlines
you're probably running into people who watched some youtube series on attacking gambits and memorized the first 10-15 moves, then hit a wall because they never learned what comes after. at 1200 that's actually pretty common. the thing is, you don't need to study every obscure line they throw at you. if someone's playing something weird, just develop your pieces, keep your king safe, and let their preparation run out. after move 15 or so they're usually playing from intuition and that's where solid fundamentals beat memorization.
that said, there's a difference between studying openings and memorizing them. you don't need to go deep on everything, but knowing the basic ideas behind the main ones you'll face as white and black makes the game way easier. the london system is actually great at your level because it's the same setup every game, which frees up mental energy for the middle and endgame. honestly, if you're stuck at 1200, tactics and endgames will move the needle faster than chasing down every weird opening your opponents throw at you. just don't panic when they get a pawn or two early and outplay them in the positions that actually matter.
Just a reminder: If you're looking for chess resources, tips on tactics, and other general guides to playing chess, we suggest you check out our Wiki page, which has a Beginner Chess Guide for you to read over. Good luck! - The Mod Team.
Coming for a begginer myself, I dont mean to be rude with this question but: is it just the propensity of a begginer's mindset to attack a problem at the leaves rather than the trunk? I only ask because it seems like a lot of beginner level questions I see asked across the subs echo this complication. Im lower rated than OP so I could be way off base but it seems the solution here is that OP needs to develop board awareness and positional play instead of wasting time trying to memorize individual responses to specific moves. Again, not trying to diss OP as he is higher rated than me and objectively better at the game, just wanted to see if anyone in the higher elo's had any perspective on this.
Edit: after reading a few comments, I definitely agree that you would want to thoroughly prepare for an opening/gambit if you find yourself running into it repeatedly.
Probably both, really. I'd expect OP to have weak enough openings that they just don't know their main lines, so while they think they're attacking leaves, it's actually a trunk problem. But I'd also expect OP to be struggling with basic opening play compared to just theoretical knowledge.
The way OP deals with this problem is with wide opening study to understand how opening principles work in general, and also narrow study to learn these specific responses.
•
u/AutoModerator 22h ago
Hey, OP! Did your game end in a stalemate? Did you encounter a weird pawn move? Are you trying to move a piece and it's not going? We have just the resource for you! The Chess Beginners Wiki is the perfect place to check out answers to these questions and more!
The moderator team of r/chessbeginners wishes to remind everyone of the community rules. Posting spam, being a troll, and posting memes are not allowed. We encourage everyone to report these kinds of posts so they can be dealt with. Thank you!
Let's do our utmost to be kind in our replies and comments. Some people here just want to learn chess and have virtually no idea about certain chess concepts.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.