Beginners should learn e4/e5 openings first

I keep running across this belief that beginners should start with double king pawn openings because those openings are open and tactical, then work their way up to semi-open games and closed games.

I'm not against it. I see the logic to it. It's nice if you want to do it that way. I think it's kinda cute to watch beginners play e4/e5 and party like it's 1899.

But is it all that crucial? You can get tactics and open positions from other openings. As I've said, I didn't learn openings that way and neither did my friends. It didn't seem to stunt our growth as chess players.

Speaking for myself as a beginner, playing the French against e4 suited me right down to the ground. I didn't mind the cramped positions. I liked building for a later counterattack. Most of all, I liked having more control over the game and avoiding all the complexity and craziness that White can throw at Black after 1...e5. Black can lose so quickly defending a double king pawn.

So what's the big deal here?

I believe playing 1...e5 is a long term-investment in your chess.

Of course, it's not necessary per se. But the variety of positions you get from 1...e5 and the way it develops both your tactical power and positional 'classical thinking' is certainly very useful whatever your opening choices may be later.

Unfortunately, I started as a 1...e6 player too, and should I make this choice again today, I would definitely pick 1...e5 as my first defence. The French is very attractice, because it's pretty simple to understand and works very well at intermediate level, but it doesn't teach you how to play 'normal positions'.

I recon that if answering e4 with e5 is good enough for people like Carlsen, Kramnik and Aronian who all play e5 in the majority of their games it is good enough for me and certainly not a beginners opening

Back in the dark ages when I leared chess we were taught the Ruy Lopez & the Guiocco Piano. It made a bit of sense because you learned about centre control, developement & pins etc, other openings will do it too but they were the fashion back then & it worked. Though its still interesting to watch 2 beginners turn the Ruy Lopez into a Sicilian or a Queens Gambit

There is a logical order to knowledge.  It only makes sense to learn the basics before you progress to more complex forms.

There is a logical order to some knowledge. There is no way around learning algebra before calculus. However, chess is not mathematics. You can play the French before the Black Ruy or Piano with ease.

Without the knowledge gained by these basic formations, it is not possible to understand fully the more complicated forms.

I consider this insupportable.

First, the French is not more complicated than, say, the Ruy -- it's just a different opening.

Second, it's not like beginners won't be exposed to e4/e5 openings at all. For instance, I play 1.e4 and face 1...e5 with some regularity. I've watched other people play e4/e5. I've played over master games with e4/e5. I've read summaries of e4/e5 openings in books. Whether the fullness of my knowledge would meet with Estragon's approval, I neither know nor care.

I stopped playing in my early twenties. My friends kept on playing and three of them made it to master. I've found some of their games online and they still don't play e4/e5 or d4/d5 as Black. I would be reluctant to criticize their understanding of chess.

If all chess openings evenutally open up, you're going to get experience playing open positions whether you play e4/e5 or not.

I believe playing 1...e5 is a long term-investment in your chess.

Of course, it's not necessary per se. But the variety of positions you get from 1...e5 and the way it develops both your tactical power and positional 'classical thinking' is certainly very useful whatever your opening choices may be later.

hicetnunc: Everything you study is a long-term investment. I take your overall point, as I understand it, that some things are better investments, but in a nutshell I don't think the difference in playing 1...e5 vs 1...e6 as a beginner amounts to a difference that makes a difference. If it does, I've not seen the evidence.

You can't learn everything in chess at once. You start where you are and work your way forward. If you're blocked because you don't know something, you learn that.

You didn't learn 1...e5 as a beginner. Nothing stops you from learning it now and perhaps you already have.

It's a pleasure conversing with you.

Speaking for myself, a difference that would have made a big difference in my chess development, far more than learning any particular openings, is the intensive tactical training which is common today.

That wasn't around in the sixties and seventies in the US. There were puzzle books and puzzle pages in the chess magazines, and you looked at them now and then, but basically you sweated out your tactics over the board and if you played enough games you got better at tactics.

It was a slow way to go. Playing the Ruy Lopez instead of the French might have sped that up but not by much.

If I could have the last ten years and the money I spent on chess books back I would have played 1. e4 e5 the whole time. This is not because 1. e4 e5 is the most basic form that has to be mastered before I move on to other positions, this is because I can get a varity of positions from 1. e4 e5 and switch from line to line with minimal effort to avoid getting board. 

I assume that most of the people trying to learn chess are quite young and therefore impatient . The minute they understand that the Queen is the strongest piece on the board , they try to activate it as soon as they can. Playing 1.e4 fullfills that primal desire, so I think it is natural.I can use this same reasoning for Black to answer 1. .. e5.

Even when people found out that activating the Queen too early can lead to trouble,having the possibility to be able to do it was probably highly appreciated by our forfathers in the 19th century for most of their games started 1.e4 e5 .

Maybe this is why we learn open games first. A lot of action and yes your Queen will play a big role soon. This is fast and that's what young people like. When your first lesson is about the Queens Gambit , notorious for lacking direct Queen-action , you may decide it is time to learn a different game with some more spunk.

Just a thought.

1. e4 is meant to fascinate beginners so that their interest keep going. 1. e4 leads to sharp tactical play, and beginners are lured to master them. But mostly chess is about boring games.

Till a level of 2000-2200 openings arent important to study, as long as you keep on doing normal opening moves like Nf3, Bb5, 0-0 and so on. Of course you can lose sometimes by an opening trick, but most of these games arent decided in the opening. If you play at higher level it is much more likely you lose a game because you have a little minus out of the opening.

Learning 1... e5 means learning to develope fast, castle to safety and most combinations are typical.

Playing other openings (french, caro, sicilian) teaches to gain a structural edge against piece power (sicilian), develope the queenside (french) and get an endgame advantage, sometimes even the king in the middle (Karpovs Ke7!) (caro-kann).

I think 1... e5 is most important to learn. But beginners think: Everyone plays e5, I want to scare white because I play something diffrent, something cool like the Dragon Sicilian. This does hinder improvements slightly. After changing to e5 I gained 500 ELO. (I was also kinda underrated). 

Players who plays 1... e5:

Beginners (under 1200 ELO)

Strong Players (2000+)

Very strong players (2700+)

Soviet players (they had a theory: As soon you are able to checkmate with queen, play the ruy lopez as often as possible. It's dynamically perfect for teaching)

Well, I agree that you can become a strong (ie. 2200+ player) by various means, and I know some strong players who don't have what I call 'a classical chess education'.

Still, I've been struck by three examples, which don't prove anything, but got me thinking :

• back in my student years, my first mentor, Benoit René, was an incredible player ; he was rated ~2250 (in the late 80's that was something !) but he displayed so many chess qualities that I couldn't understand what prevented him from going higher - during a training session with GM Anatoli Vaïsser, the GM told him he could become a GM(!), if he was ready to work on the fundamentals, and advised him to study IQP positions ! I'm not sure Benoît took the advice, though he became a stronger player nonetheless (FM). For me 1...e5 positions contain the fundamentals of chess (including the fight for space, one of the most important aspect of positional chess I think)

• I had another friend, rated +2100, who had played the Dragon since he was a child. He was wondering if always playing the same schemes may have blocked his chess progress (okay, I admit the Dragon is more schematic than many other defences to 1.e4)

• And last but not least, we have the example of GM Nigel Davies, who wrote in his book Ten ways to get better at chess how switching from the Modern to 1...e5 transformed him as a player and was essential in his achieving his GM title. I think Kortchnoi also made a case for 1...e5 as a good choice for people who want to improve.

And, yes... I've picked 1...e5 at my first defence two months ago : let's see next year how many rating points I have dropped

Ah well, what an aspiring grandmaster should play is a different question and a very different situation from what a beginner should play.

If an advanced player wants to go all the way to GM, I'm sure he needs to know all the major openings, all the major endgames and all the major tactical and positional motifs, as well as a fair chunk of all the great games which have been played and the players themselves.

I agree that it would be a poor choice for a master to rely on the same openings he played when he was a 1200 player.

One might generalize backward that beginners should study in a similar way, but that strikes me as a less persuasive argument, especially since successful beginners who have relied on non-e5 defenses abound.

GM David Bronstein sometimes had the peculiar habit of staring at the board for quite some time ( more than 1 hr once) and only then play his first move. He said he was intrigued by all the possibilities it offered and the beauty of the initial pawn-structure. Having such an infantile attitude sure helped him to become one of the strongest GMs of his era.

Of course you can play French but I'm not sure if it's the fastest way to improve. There's still some logical order in chess knowledge even if it's not as strict as in math. For example, one should probably learn some basic pawn endings before more complex endings. In the same way, open positions logically come before closed ones.

Why? For one thing, closed positions can and often do open up later on whereas if the pawns have been exchanged open positions won't turn closed later on. Also, the most fundamental laws of opening battle, ie., fast development, importance of centre and king safety, manifest themselves most clearly in open games. They remain important in closed positions also, but their significance is diminished which makes getting intuitive crasp of these things harder.

I don't think it's coincidence why also historically the strategy of open positions (Morphy) was developped before the closed ones (Steinitz etc.).

I think most of those claims that players should learn 1.e4 e5 early on come from the type of Russian trainer that only sees pupils when they're already rather strong.

I think the reasoning goes: beginners should play everything. Play through loads of master games, play what they play, experiment and have fun.

Once you're sort of good and start serious training (say 2000-ish or so), then it's important to learn things in order. Then you switch to classical things, 1.e4 e5 and the Tarrasch against 1.d4.

And you add other openings when you're strong. Like, IM chasing GM norms...

Of course, most of us amateurs don't aspire to become GMs. We have lives outside of chess and this is a hobby. We all want to improve, but improving 150 points over what I'm now in the next decade would be great.

In that context, play whatever you want, it doesn't matter.

@MarkGravityGood ,

Yes , good strategy is what gives you the right position wherein good tactics is needed to finish the job . Then good technique takes over to win the ensuing endgame. Chess is 99% tactics .

Einstein was a very intelligent man . He had  a very deep and personal insight in the way nature works . This was pure physics and using maths he was able to transform this into two beautiful equations .

The trick he used (he said) was to try to see things as simple as possible and then to discover how hard this turns out to be.

Returning to chess I'd say that only very strong GMs are capable of really understanding these simple things.The strong GMs know how to apply the formulas and the rest of us are still in Newtonian times so to speak.