Avoiding opening preparation in the Concord Open

I’ve always been annoyed by booked-up opponents. Just like every chess player ever. After all, what we really want (or what we think we want) when we sit at the board is a battle of wits, not a memory contest. But sadly, our opponents aren’t brave like us. They’re too fearful of a true fight so they hide behind brainless theory and middlegame plans, trying to turn chess from a strategic slugfest into an AP Exam. Well, what can one do? Play crazyhouse, atomic chess, or even duck chess? Nope, there’s theory there now too! (Ok I haven’t played duck chess but someone must have made it their life purpose by now) Is there any way to avoid being forced into hours and hours of memorization and recollection? In the end, most of us eventually accept that we have to become what we hate and become opening theoreticians ourselves. 

I’m definitely part of the problem of over-prepared opponents who are too scared of actual skill. I’ve utilized preparation and the databases, not without at least some success, to gain an unfair advantage while playing everything myself to keep my opponents guessing. For instance, here’s my dirtiest win from opening preparation:

The problem? It does take time, and the prodigies, followed by the past prodigies, have gotten even more knowledgeable in the last few years. I’m now part of the adult crowd, and I frequently feel too lazy to keep up and especially hate reviewing lines (learning new lines can be fun, but realizing how bad your recollection of it is 3 months later? Terrible!) Surely there’s a way to be like Magnus and avoid preparation (that’s what everyone says he does, I’m sure he still studies a ton) so that the precious few hours of chess study can be devoted to actual skill!

Anyhow, there obviously are methods and techniques that one can use to reduce the theory load, but what about no theory at all? The tournament yesterday was my attempt to see if I could figure it out. Based on how the openings went, I think it’s fair to say that you can kind of “wing it” sometimes, but not all the time! And you still have to think about how you’re going to avoid memorization!

THE TOURNAMENT

Going into the the 1st Concord Open (held in, you guessed it, Concord), I was “ready” to wing my openings 100%. That’s right, I was just going to show up with no preparation at all, and beat them with my pure chess “skill”! I figured that it should work out fine. After all, looking at my most recent games, I honestly wasn’t getting that much from my openings. I would frequently get good positions, but my attempts to recall lines would frequently mess with my actual thinking and I’d mess them up. And I had all kinds of lucky saves from worse positions. So going into this event I decided to solve puzzles and not look at a single variation, making my minimal chess study entirely tactical.

In the first round, I played local prodigy Arthur Zhou (a 10 year old 1930). He’d beaten me in our last encounter just 2 weeks ago, and since I knew that he prepares a lot for our games (he hasn’t even tried to hide it and chats and jokes with other prodigies about me when I’m within hearing distance!) I’ve tried to play something new every time to avoid being predictable.

But in those games I’d still prepared quite a bit. This time I wasn’t going to at all. Since I was Black and I knew he was an 1.e4 player, I decided after some thinking that the best opening would be the Modern. What makes the Modern a preparation-resistant opening? For one thing, no one is that prepared against it. But there’s also so many different move orders and even more importantly, middlegame plans. By holding all of the pawns back, Black really can aim for any pawn break depending on White’s placement, though …e5 and …c5 tend to be the classic ones. There’s also the …a6 and …b5 plan, and the …c6 lines. The key is that even though Black will be worse (and that’s the downside of course), he’s not in a clearly defined structure (such as an inferior QGD or KID) where the opponent knows how to play the resulting position so White will have to be super precise and on top of all the potential changes in the pawn structure to maintain the edge. It’s not even really specific preparation that it dodges; it avoids “normal” positions that the opponent is familiar with.

That was my thinking anyway. Here’s the game:

Clearly the Modern worked out fine as an opening. We reached a position where both of us failed to really know what was going on, and finally I guess I outplayed him?

In the next round I got to play White, which I figured would make it a lot easier to not worry about opening preparation. My choice of the Two Knight’s Caro succeeded in “just getting a game”.

What NOT to do!

I found myself with 2.5/3 at this point in the event (I’d taken a half point bye in the first round since I was directing and there was an odd number of players in my section) and got my biggest challenge yet in the final round, a 2100 named Gerard Potorski. Simply playing whatever seemed to be doing well against those Class A players, but this time, I went too far:

So after all of those adventures, I don’t think I have anything new to say on what you should do if you want to avoid opening theory. If you’re sensible and avoid getting a defined pawn structure, no NM (Non-Master) is going to be able to put you away from memorization alone. And you also should also not fear instances where you do find yourself totally and unequivocally outprepared; your opponents are not going to be prepared once you play a subpar move through victory. In the end we’re still playing chess, not memory.

But I can repeat the most obvious free advice: DON’T PLAY THE NAJDORF!