My eBook (Openings)

by Odd Gunnar Malin , Norway, Thursday, November 17, 2005, 09:33 (7093 days ago) @ Tony Kosten

Hi.

Thanks for the book, I have read your book and liked it very much and will try to adopt many of yours ideas into my practice.

There is one method one may find in other books with this topic, this is to find a strong player that suit your style and copy his reportuare. Since you don't mention this could you tell us what you think of this method. I'm not talking of copying players like Morozewitch and his like, even though all have to like his style, but players like Anand, Sutovsky, Kramnik, Karpov etc. Eg. players with a helthy reportuare even for lower rated players. With this said, I personaly follow your advice to use reportuare books for this. Still you can find your follower like Khalifman's White/Black according too ... Currently I use Khalifman's 'White according to Kramnik' (5 books) for my White reportuare and 'Chess Opening for Black, Explained' by Alburt/Dzindzichashvili/Perelshteyn for my Black reportuare. I don't try to memorize variations but use them to look up the theorie after the game to extend one move at the time. For the Black reportuare I also have some of Dzindzichashvili's DVD to make it entertaining to learn ideas.

In the chapter 'Practice with the real thing' I see you hinting to use books for help when playing against computers and on the Internet. I have to say that if I learned that my opponent on the Internet did use any kind of outside help, books, notes, computer, other player, etc. I would be very annoyed and most certainly put him on my 'noplay list'. For myself I do belive this is a 'bad' method to learn openings too and would not use it against a computer neither. Thinking back for what you remember of openinganalyses, what is nailed into you memory is the lines you played in a real game and did some analyses of afterwards. I see that you too think it is best to not use books but should wish you removed the sentence with hinting to use books on Internet play.

Maybe I missed a chapter on how to prepare for a tournament. What I do is to collect as many games I find by my expected opponents and check these game against my reportuare to fresh it up in those variations. On a lower level it could be har to find many games but a lot are put up on the internet from lower rated tournaments too. I keep my database of those games online on the Intenet (http://norbase.sjakk.biz/) so any player with the same playing area as me (Norway) can take advantage of it. Then I try to create an 'openingbook' for a playingprogram with these games as input, and practice against it. In addition I use a selfmade program(*) to practice/memorize openings where I keep my hole reportuare and add moves I could expect to be playing in the tournament to a copy of my reportuare. Any thought on when this work should be done (for an amateur), I have read somewhere that it should be made 1-2 weeks before a tournament (the last week is for tactics).

Odd Gunnar Malin

(*)
If anyone want to checkout the program, I have put it up at http://polarchess.sjakk.biz/. It is a playingprogram that extend in dirction of learning and is still in 'beta'. Basicly the opening memoriazion feature works much like Bookup where you mark your reportuare moves and the machine answer with a random move from the book.