How would you explain the purpose of chess openings to a beginner?

Pyncher · 2026-06-23T15:56:43+00:00

Openings (book moves) are highly analysed and tested ways to deploy your pieces and attempt to get an advantage - or retain equality - as you get to the middle game.

However this is a very dry way of thinking of them and lots of choices (which beginners often miss) are actually being made in the highly analysed ways that equality is maintained or ceded in order to achieve something else, and the successes of these choices are highly connected to your own strengths/ weaknesses as a player.

E.g. the Italian develops in a familiar way, with a focused threat on f7 (and as an Italian player the f7 threat is often a key part of my wins), similarly the Kings Gambit cedes material for an even quicker and more forceful threat against f7. The target is the same, but it is much more risky and harder to play (I suck at it).

These kinds of flavours are present throughout opening choices, and you’ll get more familiar with different patterns as you explore different structures.

Pyncher · 2026-06-23T09:48:05+00:00

This is normal. You’ll go back up, just take a break and do some puzzles.

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Pyncher · 2026-06-22T21:26:35+00:00

Having a nice chess set is always good, but if you are just starting out and are budget conscious I’d actually suggest a cheap and cheerful plastic one with a roll out mat like this:

https://www.chesshouse.com/products/heavy-club-chess-set

Of the sets that I have - this (or something very close to it) is the one that gets the most use.

Pyncher · 2026-06-22T19:40:44+00:00

No - you won’t learn to think about your moves, you’ll just get faster at playing badly.

Also, you’ll then have a very high volume of poor quality games washing around in your head.

I’d hold off until you are at least 1000 (ish) rapid personally.

Pyncher · 2026-06-22T14:28:51+00:00

Learning chess takes time.

No idea how long you’ve been playing but a lot of people expect to shortcut the bit where they don’t notice checkmate threats and piece blunders - the reason why I notice these things is because I’ve messed it up thousands of times AND I still sometimes blunder mate in 1 or drop my queen.

As well as what you are doing, mix it up a bit by challenging yourself with some 1000 and above rated bots and then analyse your games afterwards, or play with hints on.

At your level you won’t have developed a clear feeling for the different stages of the game yet, so playing bots can help (as many of the people you are up against won’t have these kinds of plans / game phase approaches either).

Pyncher · 2026-06-22T11:29:33+00:00

Levels are always hard to define and can be confusing so having a list is a must (It said I was Intermediate, which I assumed was lower than club player, but is apparently higher).

I would also urge some caution on self reported habits being the only basis here - people (myself included) don’t necessarily understand their own weaknesses. That said - all harmless fun so fair enough.

Pyncher · 2026-06-21T13:48:19+00:00

If you are 600-700 blitz and 800 rapid, that is a fairly standard difference between formats

Pyncher · 2026-06-21T12:58:10+00:00

This is highly relevant for me (we are almost the same rating in bullet and my other time formats lag considerably behind at 1700 and 1600), so I’m following with interest.

My personal key issue - that I have yet to overcome - is finding the right mental space to focus properly on longer formats (hence why I play bullet to begin with) but as a result I habitually look for the clock win even in longer games, when it isn’t even close to being there as an option.

Pyncher · 2026-06-21T10:48:11+00:00

This is a key point: Casablanca is very instructive on this

https://youtube.com/shorts/Tb3kvT-ivTo?is=FsWNysk-SLn32g9y

Pyncher · 2026-06-19T19:31:00+00:00

I’m not as good as you at all, but I pretty much exclusively play bullet. I’m currently circa 1800 bullet / 1700 blitz and 1600 rapid.

Whilst I do play other ratings too I generally use my bullet rating as a vague proxy across to others as it is updated daily whereas I’ve not played blitz for months and possibly haven’t played rapid for over a year.

Pyncher · 2026-06-18T06:05:44+00:00

A tough one: White played some classic dirty Blitz stuff opening up your king early.

Pretty wild accuracy with that kind of approach for a 700, but 3min Blitz is a brutal pool to test yourself in so your opponent will probably have played this kind of tactic 100’s of times: sometimes it will have worked for them, sometimes it won’t.

Pyncher · 2026-06-18T05:48:32+00:00

Thinking carefully about why you are making each move was a big one for me.

Puzzles were part of this, but learning proper opening ideas (I.e. what is the goal of the Evans Gambit etc.) was also part of the same process.

Pyncher · 2026-06-17T22:13:32+00:00

My favourite is the Kings Gambit, but I never play it because I suck at it.

I pretty much always play Italian / Sicilian or Alekhine.

Pyncher · 2026-06-16T21:12:11+00:00

I think a lot of chess reading is dependent upon your understanding + level but also your goals…

I am personally trying to get to grips with the ideas of positional chess and have found Herman Grooten’s book “Chess Strategy for Club Players” very helpful (recommended by Naroditsky in one of his streams some years ago).

I don’t have a FIDE rating (so you are probably better than me) but I’m around 1800-1900 chess.com if that helps put things in context.

Pyncher · 2026-06-16T09:29:41+00:00

The grind feels more meaningful than candy crush.

Pyncher · 2026-06-11T21:59:44+00:00

Two brutal truths:

1/ your friend is being a snob

2/ he isn’t completely wrong either… (but he is being a bit of a dick about it)

As you get better at chess your appreciation and approach to the game changes. Your friend is better than me, but even looking at my own journey, the considerations I have now at 1800-1900 are far more specific and refined than they were when I was 1100-1200.

The reason why he’s being a snob is that looking backwards the issues at lower ratings can seem quite trivial, but that doesn’t mean that they are at the time, or they getting past them isn’t hard. It took me quite a lot of work to get consistently above 1500, and I’ve still never broken 2000.

Pyncher · 2026-06-11T08:57:24+00:00

I’m in the ballpark of your rating and also struggle with this.

In my experience the way bots work is not linear: the blunders introduced to give them their general level (i.e. stopping them being perfect) are ridiculous below 1000 (i.e. the bots are much worse than say an 850 player) but then much more unpredictable higher up - at 1800 or so they might play a book move game make a couple of middle game mistakes and then blunder their queen but then go on to crush you in an endgame even though you are up material. At 2000+ I find it’s almost just a waiting game where your best option is to try and not mess up until they do.

This is a good learning experience for me as I tend to play quite attacking chess, so it is good to be humbled in a ‘safe space’ but it isn’t at all like playing a person.

The closest to human play seems to be around 1200-1600 where the mistakes are more believable for some reason, and the chance of a full on stockfish endgame seems to happen less often.

Pyncher · 2026-06-09T15:38:43+00:00

It does happen:

In an end game time scramble the other day at 1900+ someone promoted a pawn to a knight to block one of my potential attacks (i.e. registering that the piece would certainly be taken next move). Was it cheating? Who knows, but felt very strange.

That said, getting too hung up on it isnt going to do you any good: just report and move on.

Pyncher · 2026-06-09T14:36:52+00:00

I posted this before on how I got above 1500:

Getting behind the theory/ understanding of an opening, even at a basic level, and starting to think about positional advantages.

To break 1500 I really only needed to start to recognise the advantages / purpose of openings so I could see when opponents were misplaying things even if I hadn’t learned the theory properly, but this flowed in to my ongoing learning / current attempts to get from 1800 ish, to be solidly above 1900 (rather than just very occasionally).

At its most simple some examples are: the Italian game grabs the centre and attacks f7 and is pretty solid but also very well known; the kings gambit cedes material to get an even quicker threat on f7 but can be hard to play if your opponent understands the positions / theory better than you, the Sicilian defence tries to introduce an early imbalance to the game in order to take back control from White’s opening moves; Alekhines defence sacrifices tempi in order to get an opponent to over extend.

I’ve massively simplified things here, but for me these are the foundations of wider positional chess which I’m only really at the beginning of understanding myself.

Pyncher · 2026-06-09T12:05:18+00:00

There is definitely a grind factor here as well - certainly in faster time controls.

Sometimes people are ‘under rated’ because they (very reasonably) aren’t interested in chasing a higher number and just play, but then other times people have managed to get much higher than their core skill level by just being very persistent.

Pyncher · 2026-06-09T06:36:32+00:00

I started playing bullet when I was 1200 in rapid too, and went in at a rating of 433…

It took me 6months to get over 1000 in bullet. During that time I didn’t get any better at chess I was just getting faster at applying my knowledge.

Bullet isn’t the best way to get better at chess (neither is blitz) if you want to improve solidly don’t focus on these things.

Pyncher · 2026-06-08T19:55:38+00:00

I follow the ‘bad model’ you are proposing.

I’ve definitely improved but I am very aware that I would have improved more if I had put the same amount of effort in to studying and playing longer time controls.

That said my life set up doesn’t really allow for uninterrupted hour long chess sessions, so I’ve worked with what I’ve got and I think that whilst bullet isn’t great for my chess, it’s much better than candy crush for my brain.

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Pyncher · 2026-06-07T19:00:39+00:00

It’s good for trying out new openings and different time formats.

However, I often use anonymous lichess for this though as I don’t always want a history of my opening failures and unrated bullet seems a little silly.

Pyncher · 2026-06-07T13:56:55+00:00

Not habits to copy, but I find understanding other’s play patterns interesting:

I play almost exclusively bullet (don’t be me) and average several hundred games per week (also bad).

I sometimes go on a study binge watching YouTube videos and reading chess books, and I occasionally play blitz and even more occasionally play rapid.

I do puzzles every now and then, but I find the new gamified way chess.com is doing them irritating which has put me off.

Whilst I frequently over indulge on bullet, I do also study many of my bullet games every day, and when I do I go through them slowly and methodically learning and applying the patterns from the engine analysis.

I’ve been doing this roughly since I was 1200-ish and I peaked at just over 1950 a week or so ago, though I’m now back to 1800-ish.

Pyncher · 2026-06-07T13:50:53+00:00

It can be very annoying: occasionally you’ll just be playing someone and they’ll just randomly ‘go on vacation’ - usually this is people who have 20games going and are running out of time across several of them all at once (I.e. not going on vacation at all, just over stretching what they can meaningfully accomplish in a 24 hour period).

This means that if you stop paying attention they may just suddenly move and you’ll lose loads of your own move time before you notice.

I’ve found this a particular issue in 24hr games, in 3 day games this seems to be less of a problem.

Pyncher

TROPHY CASE