BtM 36A: How to study openings

 March 1989, Position G

Black to play

Fedorowicz - Dlugy, World Open 1988

Contributions to the comments box are welcome. I’ll reply with what the Masters have to say about their choice to anybody who suggests a move.

Scroll down to see some commentary from me and the Masters’ feedback.

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If 'What Most People Do is Not the Way to Go' (KMKY 8 Nasty, Brutish and not Short) is true, it counts double with regard to studying chess openings. All that theory out there, all those courses and all those videos … and yet most of us still suck when it comes to actually playing the game.

There has to be another, better, way. I think there is. Or ways, plural, perhaps.

One of the things we might do when it comes to studying the Sicilian Defence, say, is take 100 positions where … d5 is potentially on the cards, going through them one by one and deciding if Black should actually play it.

More of that another day. For this post I want to look at another, much more fundamental, problem I have.

It doesn’t take much experience with the Sicilian Defence to see that … d5 is a potential move. Freeing Black’s game by pushing the queen’s pawn forward is a standard plan to free Black’s game in pretty much every open Sicilian variation.

What else could Black play? Well, you could regroup the DSB - as Dlugy did. It isn’t doing much on e7, after all. A backwards’ move and therefore @WMILTTI ’s choice presumably (BTM 35).

There are quite a few other moves at Black’s disposal. The panel of 12 Masters came up with six different choices and Howell mentioned a seventh - … a3 - that he said he might very well have chosen in a real game.

I only really looked at 1 … d5. I did have a brief check of 1 … 0-0 (my analysis was poor although I was probably right to reject it because of 2 Bc4), but about 95% of the analysis I recorded was based on 1 … d5.

It’s not as if I hadn’t seen any alternatives. In my general overview of the position I’d noted that Black can increase the activity of his bishop by playing 1 … Bd8 and 2 … Bb6. I didn’t analyse it though. Not at all. Why? I’ve no idea. I just didn’t.

It’s probably not a great idea to have too many candidate moves (BTM 34), but having just the one can’t be great news either.

1 … d5 isn’t a bad move at all. In fact it’s pretty good. Maybe even the 'best’ Black has in the position. It’s the move that gets you ten points, that’s for certain.

There’s nothing wrong with choosing 1 … d5. The issue is how I came to that decision. Spending the vast majority of my time thinking about one particular move, which I then go on to play, is not that rare for me.

Becoming over-focused on one particular idea worked out this time. Often, needless to say, it doesn’t. Which is not surprising. A lot of the time, it seems, I’m not exactly choosing what to do next but rather coming up with justifications to make whatever move it was that first popped into my head.

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POINTS

10: … d5

9:  … Bd8

7:  … Qa5, Ra5

4:  … axb3, h5

3:  … a3

MASTERS

… d5:   Flear, Levitt, J. Littlewood, Memphisto Almeira

… Bd8:  Davies, K. Arkell, Pein

… Qa5:  Plaskett, Norwood

… Ra5:  Suba, Kosten

… axb3: Horner

… h5:   Howell

SOURCE

Fedorowicz - Dlugy, World Open 1988 20 … Bd8