Pet Peeves #1 The value of memorizing lines

Ever since I learned that lichess would be introducing a blog feature (yesterday), I was thinking about what a fun blog series would be. I decided some chess pet peeves would be a fun topic to delve into in more detail, and that this is a better format for it than twitter because it will be harder for readers to reply and much less tempting for me to reply back. And, in this case, much less likely that employees of chessable or aimchess will hop on in the replies. Onwards.

I spend a decent amount of my study time on openings. I own a fair amount of chessable courses on openings, and have even completed a few of them. I have preferences of what types of openings I like playing, against whom, under what circumstances. I am, in other words, 'booked up' for an amateur player. With that said, STOP OBSESSING OVER YOUR OPENINGS.

Here are useful things to know about any opening you play:
1 Where do the pieces go?
2 Which pieces serve what sort of function (defending/attacking, long-term vs short-term)
3 What transformations to the pawn structure is each side striving for, and how does this affect 1 and 2?
4 What sorts of deviations or tricky lines have been tried that aim at exploiting you for going on auto-pilot re 1-3
5 How much memorization is required to play each side well, and how likely is it that your opp has memorized?

I'm sure this list is incomplete. Add to it in the comments if you'd like. But I wanted a rough backdrop of what useful opening study can look like, since these questions require research to answer and sometimes have no super obvious or unique answer, and so require looking through several books and playing through tons of model games. Lots of work to be done. But we can contrast this sort of work with obsessing over the opening.

Here are things that I'd consider obsessing over the opening:
1 Memorizing every line (in a chessable course, or through a DB, or from a book) all the way to its end
2 Changing your opening repertoire more than like once in your life
3 Paying careful attention to your own stats in a particular opening, esp from blitz/rapid no-increment games
4 Drawing strong connections between your style/preferences as a player and your repertoire

Let's go through the dangers with each one.

1: Memory
Memory is a fickle thing. For many sub-2000 players, and probably many above, you will not remember every move you've ever learned, even those you've gotten right in your spaced repetition. Worse, will you recognize that your opponent switched up a move order or played a slight deviation? But more importantly, how often will you be using all of these lines? I just looked at my games from my last tournament to see when I got out of book.

Rd 1. White against an 1840: out of book after black's seventh move in a 1 d4 2 Nf3 3 g3 system where white's first 6 move are virtually always the same.

But after 7...Ne4 I already did not remember what would come next. Frankly, I don't remember what to play after any other black move.

Rd 2. Black against an 1890. Out of book after white's fourth move.

Rd 3. White against a 2000. Out of book after black's second move.

Rd 4. Black against a very underrated 1500. Out of book after white's seventh move.

Four games. Four decent positions out of the opening. Zero games in book up to move 10, let alone move 20. Of course, if my opponents played an open sicilian and we entered into a najdorf, the odds of getting 15+ book moves would increase. Which is convenient: those are the lines I've bothered to learn rather deep. But here, what mattered more than anything was that I had a better feel than my opponent for breaks, piece placement, and transformations, and that I knew that none of these openings rewarded careful memorization out to move 20 so did not have to fret entering into these positions.

2: Switching it up.

There's a temptation that, when things aren't working, you should switch it up. I've fallen victim to this temptation before. And you can't blame me. Every month or so there's a new ad for a new course that promises to give you just what you needed for your game. Even if these courses ever delivered what they promised, the problem is that unless you were playing a crappy opening in the first place (#teamscandi), all the resources you needed to solve your problems were already there within the opening you were playing. You just hadn't done the work to find them. Probs because you were memorizing lines instead. So there is a temptation to hop from shallow depth knowledge in one area to a knew shallow depth in another as a solution to a deep problem. This won't work.

3: Stats.

Most of us are not playing anywhere near good enough chess to where the results we get broken down by our opening play is relevant at all. I suppose it would be interesting to know that I tend to get great positions out of my najdorf, but blow many of them, whereas I tend to get equal-ish positions from my Catalan, but should that be surprising? the naj is an opening I've memorized rather deep, and the catalan is one i play more by feel. These are the results you'd expect, just like you'd expect to 'ruin' great positions when you're out of book if you haven't mastered the resulting plans. Or if you flag a lot. Similarly, do not craft your repertoire based on how moves score at master level. Those stats can be skewed by forcing lines that club players don't know, as well as by the fact that what's drawish for them might not be drawish for us, and vice versa.

4: Steez

This is the trickiest one. As a youth, I would play the king's gambit and the dragon because I was a tactical player. I still hear grown adults talk like this all the time: the Italian game is too boring, the French is passive, the London is dry. I call this the fallacy of letting the opening play you, instead of playing the opening. It's certainly true that an open game can yield more tactics than a static, closed one. Or that imbalanced positions can yield more dynamics than symmetrical ones. So those considerations about what feels more comfortable for you should absolutely go into crafting your repertoire. But if you've ever seen Jobava or Rapport play a London, Aronian or Shakh play the queen's gambit, or, in a different direction, Nakamura or Radjabov play the Spanish, you'll see that if you're not bogged down by book lines there is plenty of room in any opening to take it in the direction that makes sense for you.

All of this to say: play whatever you want. If it's what you've already been learning, that's probably what you should keep playing. If you're running into problems with it, try to build up your model games database before going back into the memorization mines. And don't fall into the trap of letting your openings define you. Besides, it'll probably be your endgame blunders that define you, anyways.