understanding the space of openings
the idea of learning openings never interested me. but theres four reasons i change my mind today:
- i spend a lot of time in the opening that id rather use on the midgame
- putting names to tactics really helped me organize ideas in my mind and think faster. so why wouldnt putting names to openings help in a similar way?
- it would be nice to understand chess commentary
- now that im getting better at chess notation and being able to see the board, i feel like it just wont be that hard?
eventually i will pick a few openings to go into in depth, but for step 1 i decided to just learn to recognize and name all the most common openings, to get to know the space.
i did the intro to book openings lesson on chess dot com, and after each lesson id make myself pictures to help remember what i learned and to put similar openings in relation to each other.
for example, the scotch, italian, and spanish openings all start with e4 e5 nf3, so u can remember them together:
sometimes one opening has multiple names. the spanish opening and ruy lopez are the same. the russian defense and petroff defense are the same.
the more unusual an opening is the more likely it has more names, like h4 which has at least 5 names.
ur opening could turn into something called a gambit or a defense even if its not u doing the gambit or defense. some moves change the name of the opening and some dont.
the name depends on what both players are doing. u can make the same moves but the name changes if ur opponent doesnt play into it.
the name of the opening can change many times as it develops, in either small or big ways. it can start as king’s pawn, then u can turn into king’s gambit. or it could turn into the vienna game, and then the vienna gambit, and then something else.
different openings can turn into the same opening. so like, if theres pawns on c4 d4 and d5, its a queens gambit no matter whether the first pawn out was the c4 queens pawn opening or d5 english opening.
and a birds dutch williams something gambit is probly meant to start with birds opening, but its still a birds gambit if it comes from the scandanavian defense.
a gambit is just when u let a pawn be somewhere it can get taken. a lot of openings have gambit versions that can get added on. gambits can be accepted, declined, or have other complications added in.
u can use https://www.chess.com/practice to try out different combinations and read what opening it says it is. u can go back and change what move the computer did so u can go for the opening u want and see if u remembered it right.
my goal for today was to just get a feel for the space. im not gonna remember almost any of these, but by making diagrams of similar or related openings im starting to build a map in my head of whats possible.
and cuz ive spent some time playing slow and bad openings, while learning tactics and strategy, i can appreciate and understand openings in a way i couldnt have if i started with them.
i even got an award for completing all the beginner lessons, and for blogging so much lol
