Stop sabotaging your openings!

Choosing which opening to play is one of the most personal decisions in chess. Many players construct and perceive their repertoire as a crucial part of their chess identity (‘I am a positional player; I love the slow maneuvers of my Ruy Lopez with White’). This personal component charges any repertoire decision with emotions, as determining our openings reflects who we want to be at the board.
Emotion can aid our chess playing, as it might often be a source of information not yet consciously processed, triggered by our underlying pattern recognition. For example, we might perceive a position as dangerous because of the fear it instills in us, even before we are able to pinpoint the concrete causes of the danger.

However, this emotional component can also be a source of bias in our decision-making. As a chess player and coach, I have uncountable times observed sudden changes in opening choice that appeared irrational. Especially during tournaments, where games have higher subjective value, players are often making last-minute adjustments or changes to their opening repertoire during pre-game preparation, more so when they know who they are facing next. In this post, I’ll refer to one particular type of change: deciding on a new opening variation (or full opening sometimes) over the previously studied one.

At face value, this type of change might seem counterproductive: why would we pick an opening we have studied less? Isn’t opening study supposed to be the learning of knowledge and skills in a particular set of positions? However, there are some commonly seen biased justifications:

1. 'My opponent has prepped against my main opening'. I have an example from my own practice. The French used to be my main opening, but I really disliked facing the 3.Nc3 variation, which I replied to with 3...Nf6. Upon facing a GM in a classical tournament, I thought ‘He usually plays 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.e5 and will have it prepped, so I shouldn’t go into that’. I ended up playing 3...Nc6 as a surprise weapon against 3.Nc3, and he knew more than me there.

   This is the easiest bias to tackle. Your opponent won't be able to play your usual positions better than you with just pre-game preparation. Opening play is not just knowing the moves (which you can maybe sometimes do with pre-game prep), but also the typical endgames, middlegame positional ideas, tactics, plans, and skills, among other factors. If your opponent can surpass you in all of those in your main opening, not only is their chess skill likely beyond your level, but you are also not the first one trying to surprise them (in fact, the GM told me after the game that he had already played against 3...Nc6 before and knew it from them). To summarize, if you can’t out-know them with your main opening, you won’t out-know them with anything else. That doesn’t mean you play every single move of your main line; maybe you can throw a twist later on, but no big changes!

2. 'I have a problem with my main opening that I cannot solve'. This one was also at play in the previous example, and it showcases a powerful cognitive-emotional bias. There are usually two options in this type of opening choice: one known with a potential problem that we are familiar with, and one less known. The inclination to pick the second one stems from two reasons: we fear the regret of having the first one go wrong exactly as we predicted, and we are ignorantly happy about not knowing the problems of the second one. Regret is such a powerful emotion that it biases our perception of the logical choice: being able to visualize exactly how things might go wrong and still choosing the known option feels counterintuitive.

   Thinking rationally, the fact that we know little about the second option should be a cause of concern, and not of relief! Through our learning path for the known option, we have overcome many problems we had with it, but by picking an unknown option, we are likely to face new ones, sometimes without even noticing the trouble that’s coming our way. We must not confuse the lack of proof of problems (due to our limited knowledge) with proof of a lack of problems.

   As a separate argument for picking the known over the unknown, I’d like to add that there’s also the chance that our opponent doesn’t go into the particular line we dislike. 'It's a must-win game, and my usual opening has a forced draw' is a common example of such overestimation of the opponent's knowledge of our repertoire's weaknesses.

3. 'If I lose in some other opening, I wasn’t truly defeated'. This one isn’t said out loud, but it motivates our choice at a deeper level. When we pick an unknown opening, we undercommit to the game by positioning our ego in a ‘win-win’ scenario: 'I won with an opening I never played before' or 'I lost, but I didn’t play my opening'. Our ego and our identity remain unscathed.

Considering these arguments, little can be said in favor of opening improvisation when facing a particular game. Overcoming these biases requires experiencing them, recognizing them, and fighting back.

However, with more preparation time and in the spirit of trying out new things, choosing the less-known option makes sense in a few ways:

1. It's expected to become bored with always having the same positions. Going for something new can motivate us, resulting in a more vigorous and aware performance because we’ll need to compensate for the lack of knowledge with intuition and calculation.

2. Exploration of new openings can enlarge our understanding and enjoyment of the game, transcending any results-oriented perspective.

3. At low ratings, the previous arguments are insignificant because openings have a lesser impact on the outcome of the game.

All things considered, I hope this post helps the reader in making better decisions about their opening choices during game preparation and over the board.

So far for today's blog, thanks for your attention! I welcome your comments about the topic.

Cheers!

Juan Cruz