Why Playing Many Different Openings Won't Work For You
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[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back to Next Level Chess podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noël Studer, and I'm here once again with a podcast episode aiming to help you simplify your chess and avoid wasting time because that's one of the main ideas of today's podcast to make you understand that, nope, you don't need so many different openings.

But I actually understood or partly understood why so many of you think that even as an amateur, you should play maybe e4 and d4. You should maybe have two different lines against 1. e4 for Black, like all of these things. And that's the spoiler. No, you don't.

But I really understood it because I saw a YouTube short of Magnus Carlsen sharing one of the best advice he got early [00:01:00] on in his career. And when listening to that short, I was like, oh, yeah, now I get it. Or at least like, this is probably what you amateur hear a lot right from grandmasters that say, oh playing a lot of openings helped me, or you need a different opening against 1. e4 if it's not too drawish. Or all of that kind of stuff.

So I'll just quote from that YouTube short. Then I'll talk about why this advice works for Magnus, but it won't work for you guys listening to this. So Magnus said this and link to the short will be in the podcast description. This is Magnus speaking. "Maybe the best advice I got was from Simen Agdestein."

That's a grandmaster. That's an input from me. Back to Magnus. "At a fairly early age, we would go through some of my games, and once he noticed that for a few black games in a row, I played the same variation of the Sicilian defense and he said, I don't care if you consider this to be a good or bad opening.

[00:02:00] If you are not going to explore, you're not going to learn. He's like me. He's not a very organized person. He went to the shelf and he said, this book, this opening. So I tried that in the next game. Then I tried something else." End of quote. Now, let me be clear. I'm not trying to trash the advice from Simen Agdestein or Magnus for sharing that he was just asked what is the best or one of the best advice that he personally got.

He wasn't asked what is the best advice that you would give to other chess players. That's a totally different question. So just to get this out of the way. But, this advice if you are listening to this and think, oh yeah, that makes sense, I should do the same, then you are in for a real bad experience.

And so this is super important and I want to give the bigger picture on this. Whenever you hear some advice, you need to ask a few questions [00:03:00] before you just try to applicate that advice to your own situation. The main problem of this advisor right here is that Magnus Carlsen is an insanely unique case.

Advice that was good for him when he was a kid, super talented kid, clearly very interested in chess, very strong already, early on, is probably not going to be useful for 99.9999% of the population. So, if you don't want to be led astray by advice you hear on the internet, especially if strong grandmasters are talking what helped them to get better, then you need to ask two questions.

Question number one, who is this for? I've just said that this advice is specifically for a super young, talented, very strong, very ambitious kid. This kid probably had very good results already. I don't know which age Magnus got this advice, but I [00:04:00] assume somewhere between the range of 8 to 12 years old.

That would be my assumption. This kid probably plays a hundred plus over the board games a year. I seem to remember that at some point, his family even moved for him to be able to play more or I think one of their parents quit their job or something along these lines. So he was really into chess a lot. And Magnus spent a lot of time training chess. So this is who the advice is given for.

And then the second question is, what is the goal of this advice? And we can safely say that the goal was for Magnus to become as strong as possible. Probably at this time already, they understood, okay, he will become a FIDE master, international master. Maybe he was already, we don't know. And then grandmaster, and then try to go for the world elite.

And so the goal was a very long-term improvement plan for a very, very, very talented kid. So to recap who this advice is for, this [00:05:00] advice is very good for young kids that are super talented playing a hundred plus games a year.

I'm talking of over the board classical games, not blitz games, guys, aiming to become world class and able to understand new positions very quickly with minimal guidance. And then also that have several grandmasters actually, because I remember Magnus saying that Agdestein was not his main coach.

So Magnus had several coaches that were telling him how to play certain positions and were analyzing these games with him. So now I'm asking a question, does this sound like you? And I'm not trying to be mean, but I don't think that's my target audience. I don't think people listening to this podcast are all the new Magnus Carlsen, because probably who would've heard of you, and probably, let's be frank, you wouldn't need my advice. Okay? So this is super important. This is super specific advice. [00:06:00] And it did work for Magnus, and I'll get to that shortly and it will not work for you.

So why did it work for Magnus? As a young kid, he absorbed new information like a sponge. So his coaches probably quickly realized he could play different positions and play them reasonably.

He would learn a lot when playing a new position, but he wouldn't just hang a piece. Because the point is, if you're just hanging pieces, no matter which position you play, you don't learn much about that position. You need to play a position pretty decently for then to analyze it and then to understand new depth of that position.

Then you accelerate your learning. And then also probably his mindset was pretty good and his time horizon was super long. So even short term, mistakes and losses wouldn't impact his chess too much. If you would just compare this with a kid that is super low in confidence and you force them to play different openings all the time.

Yes, you can [00:07:00] teach them to lose. That would be one way of seeing it. But on the other hand, you might also just risk that this kid is quitting chess because you're forcing them into a new situation every single game. Makes mistakes, loses games, is not having fun anymore. So it really always depends. Who are you talking to? Who is this advice for?

For Magnus, this played out perfectly because now we're seeing that Magnus is actually extremely good in any type of position. He's really a better chess player than just anyone else on the planet. Playing early on different positions has helped him tremendously.

Now that he's in a situation where there's so much opening theory and he just tries to deviate. He can play 1. c4, 1. d4, 1. e4, 1. Nf3, all of these positions, and he has a wide experience. A long, deep experience that he can draw back on, on all of these moves. If you compare that with someone like Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, for example, he had a very narrow repertoire for so long.

This [00:08:00] is a top player. If you've never heard of MVL, I think maybe not any more top 10, but has been in the top 10 for so long. And basically always played 1. e4 and the Sicilian Najdorf as Black and Gruenfeld against 1. d4. So, for Maxime, now it's way harder to break out of this because for so many years he only had experience in these openings. Magnus had the opposite. He had experience in all the openings, so it's paying off for him.

Now, let's shortly talk about myself. I am a grandmaster. I wasn't as quick to become a grandmaster as Magnus and many of the other talented kids. I was 20 years old, and six months or seven months, something like that.

So it has like seven years later than Magnus. It's a tremendous amount of time at this age. And for me, this advice would be horrible already. I really believe I couldn't have made, or maybe it would've turned out differently, but I believe now in hindsight, that wouldn't have been good for me.

Why? Because for example, [00:09:00] one of my coaches, grandmaster Dorfman, who worked with Gary Kasparov, worked with Etienne Bacrot. That's another 2,700 player, so very, very strong players. He told me something along the lines of, I'm the worst grandmaster or player he's ever seen in a new position.

But I learn quicker, so once I see things play out, once I get comfortable in a position, I then learn quicker than others. So that's my big advantage. Now thinking back to playing, forcing yourself to play different openings all the time, that would've been a real big struggle for me.

Again, maybe I would've learned to adapt to new positions quicker. Maybe you can say the other way around. You didn't play too many openings. That's why you are so bad at adapting. I think that also, it depends just on talent, it depends on my tendencies. So for me it was very important to play kind of structures I would understand.

For me, dynamics are harder. Again, you can say, well, you should have learned that when you are young, but I just think, with [00:10:00] my predispositions would've been hard and I'm a GM, right? And now if we are taking that to you guys at home. That's really, really an even bigger step because many of my audience, you're adults, you probably didn't learn chess at five years old.

You don't have a grandmaster coach or maybe even any coach to analyze your games with, that they can say, well, this idea is good here, here go a little bit deeper. You only have the engine that just gives you which move is good or bad. Can't explain ideas. So that's very dangerous. You play maybe, and that's probably for few of you, at 25 over the board games a year.

Some play none. Some just play online. So the less you play, the less experience you can gather. The longer it goes from one game to the next one, and the more you can just forget stuff. And then last but not least, you squeeze chess training in around work and family and other commitments, other hobbies, while [00:11:00] Magnus was a kid and was just basically, I assume going a little bit to school.

And then chess, chess, chess, chess, chess. So there are so many differences. So for you, don't play the same opening several times. No matter if good or bad might be one of the worst pieces of advice you could follow, because here is how it would play out. And many of you might resonate with this because I really see many, many, many people thinking they have to do that.

They have to learn different openings, and so they get trapped in this half knowledge vicious cycle. So you pick up an opening, you watch some videos, and maybe you buy a course. And after a few games, you scratch the surface, but you still make big errors due to missing fundamentals. You maybe didn't ever study the opening principles, or you didn't study all of the pawn structures that could happen from different openings, or you just make tactical mistakes and so you don't have anyone to guide you.

You turn on [00:12:00] the engine and you see some concrete lines. You don't understand the real ideas, but you feel like, oh yeah, okay, these moves, I have to do these moves. If that happens, and then before you truly understand anything deeply, you move on. New opening, new course, new confusion. That happens with many people actually, also in Simplified Chess Improvement System.

When I ask people, Hey, share your opening repertoire, sometimes I'm astonished. People are saying, Hey, I've played e4, the London. I sometimes play the Catalan and for Black, I'm playing Sicilian, French, e5. Which one should I stick to? And I'm like, holy cow. That's more than I ever played in my career!

But if I would ask basic questions like, how do you play against an isolated pawn? What is the goal if you play with the isolated pawn? If you play against it? People would look at me. I don't know. It's like, what is Black trying to achieve when playing the Sicilian? I don't know. I just know some moves of theory.

Why does black play a6 in the Najdorf [00:13:00] Sicilian? I don't know. That's just a theory move I learned. There's so many basic questions that you don't even get to, and that makes everything much harder. So you end up making the same mistakes, mostly probably either basic strategic mistakes or more likely even tactical mistakes, just dressed in different openings.

You blunder in the French and then you blunder in the Sicilian, and you might blunder as well when you play 1. d4. Again, this is not meant to talk down on you, it's just the reality that I see with so many students. You don't need that diversified portfolio of openings if basic things are not going well.

And the problem is with so much time between your over the board games or just with less games overall that you're playing, you are learning less. And by the time you revisit an old opening, you've basically forgotten everything anyway. So [00:14:00] as you don't have deep plans and ideas, you don't have knowledge that will stay for a long time.

So once you move away from an opening to another, and then a year later, maybe you wanna circle back. That's the whole point, by the way. It's not the point to find the right opening. The point of the advice of Agdestein for Magnus was that at any moment, Magnus could go back to any of the openings and play it well.

We don't have to forget that. That's super important. So if you just cycle away from the opening and in a year later you would go back and say, okay, let's play d4 again. I haven't studied anything, probably you would feel like, oh, I'm starting from scratch, and that's not the idea. The idea would be that you can get back a year later to d4.

Use that arsenal of knowledge, of experience, of plans and ideas that you have and play a very good game with that opening. Probably not going to happen, so that's super important. Now let's finish this podcast episode on what you should do [00:15:00] instead, and pretty simple for nearly all adult improvers, the best approach.

Simple. Stick to one opening. Okay? Doesn't mean that if you started with a horrible opening and you feel like this is definitely not for me, you can't ever change, but it means that if you have a good enough opening, you don't need a second one, or you don't need to play several ones to learn more because basically what you want to do is, you wanna focus on the fundamentals that are basically a given. It's easy for Magnus.

You wanna focus on just understanding, opening principles, simple tactics, all of these things. Already at a young age, Magnus was like, yeah, that's easy. So he could go deeper. But for everyone that is, I would say, rated below 2000, even online.

It's really about the fundamentals. So if we have to worry about the fundamentals, why do we want to overwhelm ourselves with too many opening theory, with too many different structures and so on? Let's [00:16:00] understand the few structures that we're playing actually very well once you understand them deeply.

Okay. Okay. Let's think about expanding. And that's actually what happened with myself when I became a chess professional. 19 years old, I was an international master. I started diversifying my opening. I always played e4 and basically for Black, I only played the French and I played the Nimzo Indian. So I had a very fixed repertoire, and then I became a chess professional. I was like, okay, I have more time now. And I want to get stronger and probably at some point at GM level, I would have to have more openings and so I diversified. That happened when I was an international master.

For you that moment might never come. The moment I have to learn more openings or play different openings, so I can still improve my chess. You might never, ever get there and that's totally okay. So if I had to [00:17:00] rewrite the advice again, there's nothing wrong with Agdestein's advice to Magnus. There's also nothing wrong with Magnus sharing that.

It was just what was helpful for him, not what is helpful for everybody at home. So if I would rewrite this for you guys at home, trying to add context, trying to make it for adult improvers, here's what I would say. If you want to truly become a master at chess, at some point you need to explore and go outside your comfort zone.

Once you've mastered the basics, stopped making big tactical mistakes and gained confidence in your openings. Then you can start exploring new ones. Learn from your games with a coach. Expand your horizon and repeat the cycle. But until then, focus on depth and not breadth.

And actually to finish this one, I really liked the takeaway that Magnus shared at the end of this short that I saw on YouTube because this one, the kind of philosophy, the [00:18:00] mindset I really, really like, and I think that applies to many people. Magnus said, that's again Magnus quote, "and that thing, like always being curious, thinking about learning rather than being stuck, than being in the same comfortable patterns has been very important to me."

End of quote. This is really, really important. But the main thing is that sometimes you think about learning, and for you to think about learning, you need to do something different than Magnus when he was eight years old or 10 years old. We need to adjust the learning curve to your current needs, and that's why we need context.

That's why it's so important, again, these two questions. When you hear some advice, who is this for? What is the goal of this advice? And if this is not for you, then probably you shouldn't do it.

Hey guys, just two quick things before you take off. [00:19:00] If you enjoyed this episode and want more structured chess improvement tips from myself, check out my newsletter at nextlevelchess.com/newsletter. It's totally free. It'll always remain free, and it goes out every single Friday with the best, latest chess improvement tips that I have.

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