First Ten Moves Memorized?

I've been thinking about this for a long time regarding Blitz chess. In this format, I see the same openings often, but have not taken the time to go over the first ten moves in my games and look for better responses, and the likely missed opportunities.

Perhaps I am just lazy, but I don't feel like going over every blitz game from beginning to end. I've played over 1000 of them.

Do people here go over their Bullet games?

Going over only the first ten moves sounds about right, to fine tune my personal opening style, opening repertoire. What do you think? Do you memorize opening moves? What is your routine after a session of Live Chess? A pint of beer? Chessecake? Waffles?

Dessert sounds more fun than game analysis.

Two miniatures today.

I am surprised at how many miniatures I get when playing the Petroff. It's supposed to be drawish, but many players get confused and hang pieces...at my rating. I was at 1000+, but my lame excuse right now for dropping 100 points is that I played a long session a few days back when I was fighting insomnia. Every chess player has an excuse, right?

I lost a game with the Black pieces today where my opponent played 2.Qh5. I happen to like playing against this move, and know a decent reply, but forgot the critical 5...Nd4. Arg!

Unbelieveable. After posting and memorizing the move ...Nd4, I get an opportunity to play it in my first Blitz game of the night. I won White's queen.

If you want to improve, don't EVER play bullet (1- or 2-minute). The minimum to play is 5-minute. This will help with the blunders immediately. Best is of course 15-minute.

About reviewing blitz games. Well, I am a bit lazy too, and usually don't go over my blitz games, but I do think over the critical points of the game to see where I could have played better. It's not a serious analysis, of course, but it helps.

Play 90 minutes games to help improve calculation kthxbai

I don't see the relevance of these blitz/bullet games where your opponents drop random, obvious tactics.

What I do is study openings/endgames for about 30 mins- an hour a day, then do 15-30 minues of tactics puzzles. I then play a live chess game (Game in 40, 30 second increment- longer games = better quality). After the game, I analyze the game to see why I won/lost/drew, and try to take something from the game to learn (anywhere from "b4 in a mainline ruy Lopez can be  met with a5 from black" to "try harder not to get lazy in these long, grind-it-out endgames). Time permitting, I do more tactics and play another game (40/30 if possible, it's my favorite online time control)

As for your question... yes, I memorize opneing moves. At higher levels, everyone does to some extent or another. At your level, though, worry about tactics (A LOT!), have a solid grip of fundamental positional ideas, study only basic endgames, and knowing opening PRINCIPLES (not memorized lines). That, in addition to playing REAL games and analyzing them (at LEAST 15/5), will help you improve in my opinion :o

Good luck :) 

 I'd have to agree with this.

Players on this site seem to know many different openings, as well as their names.  I seem to have a similar problem, where I will lose simply based on scripted moves.....because I only know of openings that I have seen by players I've played.

Tactics may be your answer. Either that, or learn the scripted openings. I must admit that playing openings by rote seems useless to me-takes the fun out of the game. I completely understand wanting to learn them, as they are fundamentally sound. But, fundamentals seem to trump everything. If you play against an opponent that doesn't play "by the book", you will still have to be solid.

Perhaps you should play more correspondence chess, where you will have more time to guage your position. I'll send a challenge

 I'd agree with this, also. It reminds me of golf-where do you want your position to be at the end? This reference is to each hole in golf, or, any chess game.

To get to the position you want to be may require certain moves that may puzzle your opponent-all the better! Some of these seemingly benign moves by my opponents have done me in-and helped me learn.

I tried to challenge you but a message popped up that you are not accepting challenges. Why not? How can it hurt? I have a feeling you are like me, in that, we love to PLAY. If our rating goes down from a loss.....play again!

Yeah, I review every single game I play.  For bullet, I will usually only spend 2 minutes or so looking at the game - just long enough for me to answer the questions: Where did I (or my opponent) go wrong?  What did I (or my opponent) do well?  I find this helps to solidify any great ideas I have / mistakes I repeatedly make in bullet games.

Musikamole wrote:

 Do you memorize opening moves?

Yes I memorize openings, but only up to the first three moves or so.  I read somewhere that below 2000, the games are 99% tactics and only a basic understanding of opening play is required.

I don't know know how much I agree with this, but I've found in my own games that I have much more success focusing on ideas (ie. gotta take control of that semi-open d file, if he gets a knight on e5 it will be annoying, i have a 4 on 3 pawn majority - better get that rolling!...etc) rather than robotic opening moves.

Maybe memorizing the first ten moves in most lines is a bit much, and hardly practical at my level of play. I do seem to get a lot of bang for buck memorizing the first three to five moves.

When playing in the under 1200 pool, you see a lot of off beat pawn moves, i.e., 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 f3 (?). The move 2...f3 looks kinda like the Philidor with 2...d3, but it is a bad move.  I didn't think to play 3.Nxe5 (!?) until after engine analysis. Black's best reply is NOT to take White's knight. I found this quite surprising, and think that the most common/natural reply will be 3...fxe5 (?).

1. I learned that line from Nakamura's opponents. He liked playing 2.Qh5 in blitz and 2...Nc6 is one of the book moves, developing a piece while defending e5. Logical.

It was hard to see at first why 10.Qxe5 is a bad move, and can easily see one of my opponent's falling for it. 

Looking at your suggested line of 1.e4 e5 2.Qh5 Nf3 (The Kiddie Countergambit), after doing so many tactics puzzles, I can now see why you suggested this line to me a few months back. There are so many more ways that White can go wrong after 2...Nf3! It was easy for me to find really bad moves for White that looked completely logical and natural. With 2...Nf3, tons of traps await the fool who plays 2.Qh5. Thanks for bringing this to my attention, again!

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I will start with your queen trap miniature and keep adding more logical moves for White to play and lose against the Kiddie Countergambit, commiting all of them to memory.

That is so cool!

Cool, indeed!

I think it is necessary to learn opening traps so you don't fall for them, but other than that nothing (about openings).

Mini Kiddie 2 reminds me of a common trap in the Petroff where I have won several queens in Live Chess.

I thought I had played the Petroff correctly has Black, netting another miniature. Nope. I missed some real simple tactics yesterday. Must have been sleepy.

 Of course not!  That would be so totally unfair. 

Strictly random, that's my style.

sftac

I got in my first Live Chess Kiddie Gambit. It wasn't easy - and there was no trap that I could set. My opponent was pretty careful, and I only won because he dropped a minor piece, so I looked for trading down. Even though my endgame technique was weak, the resulting checkmate was, well, pretty.

Surely most sensible is to play chess at a more reasonable pace, analyse those games, memorise those openings, and then play them without needing to think much (if at all) in Blitz.

If you must play Blitz :p