Dealing With Your Opponent's Preparation

https://twitter.com/thestrongchess/status/1619703323032170498

Here’s something odd: I talk to a lot of players who are afraid of their opponents’ opening preparation, but few who are confident in their own preparation. I’ve always maintained that most of your opponents don’t know as much about the opening as you think they do, but that may be changing. How far should you really go to be unpredictable in the opening?

Consider two scenarios:

1. Playing an invitational round robin. Your opponents know far in advance that they’ll be playing against you, and they have the time and motivation to target you with specific preparation. In this case, it’s very important not to be too predictable in the opening.
2. Playing online blitz. Your opponent doesn’t know they’ll play until the game starts, and the player pool is big enough that you rarely face the same opponent twice. In this case there’s no advantage whatsoever to playing multiple openings.

How important it is for you to mix up your openings depends on which of these two scenarios more closely resembles how you usually play.

For most readers, it will be much closer to the online blitz scenario. Many people play primarily or exclusively fast time controls online. For over-the-board players in the United States, there are often multiple rounds per day, and it’s not uncommon for pairings to be announced only minutes before the round starts, leaving little time for preparation. Additionally, OTB tournament games from open tournaments in the US often aren’t available online, so your opponent might not even be able to find your games.

As an aside, if you care about your OTB tournament results, I would suggest not having an easily Google-able account on Lichess or Chess.com. If you do, it’s all too easy for your opponent to get your games with something like OpeningTree. This might seem excessively cloak-and-dagger, but giving your opponent full access to all your recent games is a pretty big edge to concede. Considering how easy it is to create an anonymous account, I just don’t see any reason to give away this information.

There are scenarios where your opponents are more likely to hit you with targeted prep. In Europe it’s more common for tournaments to have only one round per day, giving your opponent more time to prepare for you. Alternatively, some players mostly compete at a local club, where they face the same opponents over and over. Finally, in Lichess classical leagues, you have to share your screen name to set up the match, and players in these leagues tend to be highly motivated. If you’re in one of these scenarios, it’s more important to have some variety in your opening repertoire.

Even in this case though, the top priority is by far getting a single, functional opening repertoire. As with many areas of chess, what works for amateurs is different from what works for professionals. Professionals know how to play many different types of positions and they have time to study openings all day. For everyone else, building one functional repertoire is hard enough. It’s not only remembering all the lines for a second opening. Even more so, it’s getting enough experience to play the positions. If you have two parallel repertoires, you only get half as much practice with each.

If you are in a context where some level of unpredictability is important, rather than learn an entirely new opening, it’s easier to add wrinkles to your existing repertoire. I call these “jukes”:
slight twists on your main repertoire. There are multiple good ways to play most opening positions. If you can use them, your opponent might get the opening they were hoping for, but end up facing a completely different branch that they didn’t prepare for. This makes it much more dangerous for them to try to attack you with targeted prep. Learning about the alternatives will also give you a deeper understanding of your main option.

Even in the London, a “boring” opening that many would say always leads to the same type of position, there are many options:

https://twitter.com/natesolon/status/1623378651361251357

This is also a reason to play good openings in the first place. Good openings give you many playable options, whereas a bad opening may force you down a narrow path just to survive. Many people play offbeat openings for surprise value, but if the opening is objectively bad, it’s a one trick pony: if your opponent knows it’s coming, you’re out of luck. All they have to do is learn one refutation. Whereas a good opening gives you the latitude for many layers of surprises.

If you prepare your openings properly, it should not be easy for someone to punch a hole in your repertoire in the space of a few minutes or hours. You should know the main lines, important alternatives, and how to play the resulting positions. Someone spending 20 minutes memorizing a line in your opening shouldn’t trouble you. If anything, they should be the ones who are worried. They’re going into your home turf, where you have more experience. Even if they get a good position from the opening, they still have to play a middlegame structure where you have more experience. They might have memorized just enough to get them into trouble in a line where you actually know far more. And if you’ve built jukes into your repertoire, they might get hit with a surprise in a position they’ve never played before.

So far we’ve focused on defense – how to make it harder for someone to hit you with prep – but what about offense – going after your opponents? Here too I prefer sticking to a core repertoire, for many of the same reasons. Improving in the opening, like in other phases of chess, is all about iteration: stringing together lots of small positive steps. If you have a consistent repertoire, then every game you play, you get a little better at it. Whereas if you try to cook up something new for each opponent, most of that work will be wasted once the game is over.

When you find out your opponent for the next round, it’s not a bad idea to look them up to know what to expect, as long as there’s time to do so without disrupting your mindset. (The most important thing is to be calm and focused during the game.) In general you should choose which of the lines that you know how to play will give you the best chance against this opponent, but you should not attempt to learn a line you’ve never played before. Experience is a key factor in every opening, and even if you manage to memorize some moves and get them on the board, you won’t have any experience playing the position.

In these moments I often find that some hole in my opening repertoire that did not particularly bother me before the tournament started now, before the round, seems like a massive problem. For this I like to bring a notebook to tournaments where I write down this type of observation. Then if it still seems like a problem in the cold light of day, I will work on fixing it before the next tournament.

To recap:

• If you are not a full-time chess professional, it’s more practical to have a single, core repertoire than to attempt to master many different openings. Focus on improving your core repertoire iteratively over time.
• To be less predictable, you can add “jukes” to your main repertoire. This is easier than learning a whole new opening system, and fits well with the iterative improvement plan.
• Strive to get your repertoire to a point where you feel confident in it, even if your opponent knows what to expect.

If you want to learn how to use Lichess studies to build and improve a repertoire, check out this workshop I’m running next Saturday.