Trouble finding "my" openings (Openings)

by dlwyatt, Ohio, Tuesday, May 19, 2009, 23:16 (5811 days ago)

I'm about to ramble. Be warned! :)

I've been trying to settle on an opening repertoire to study, since I have forgotten so much of what I used to play, and my style in the middlegame seems to have changed quite a lot anyway (it's been nearly 10 years since I played in USCF tournaments in and just after high school. I've been studying chess again for about 8 months, but mainly tactics / strategy / endgame stuff, not memorizing opening lines).

I'm beginning to realize now that a lot of my opening difficulties stem from the fact that I pretty much suck at attack and defense. Give me a positional struggle any day of the week, and I'll figure out which squares to fight over, how to build up a position that eventually overwhelms my opponent (or fight back for some counterplay if I'm the one being squeezed). But tell me that "I have an attack" in some opening line, or have an aggressive player start coming after my King? I'm doomed. My attacks consist of fairly simple threats that are easily dealt with, unless my opponent makes a tactical blunder or I just get lucky. Since I don't play the attacks accurately, and as a natural result, I tend to get crushed on defense (not surprising, since I don't see the moves that I should really be defending against!).

This leads me to ask for two bits of advice:

1 - How would you recommend studying and practicing sharp attacks and defense of such? Tactics sites like ChessTempo are alright, but they always present positions where you know there's a way to win at least 2 pawns in the next few moves. It's not the same as throwing away a pawn or a piece just because you think there's an attack that will eventually be worth it, even though there's nothing forced and tangible in the next few moves.

2 - Are there any reasonable opening systems that one can use to steer for more positional middlegames (particularly as Black), without getting steamrolled by early pawn storms, but also don't involve 2000 pages of theory to study? :) (Sorry, no 1... e5 and 2... Nc6 for me). I tried choosing some openings based on what I played against them as White (such as the Classical Pirc), but found very fast that White has other options that are sharp and nasty, such as the Austrian Attack. I'm thinking of looking into the Caro-Kann next, and perhaps the Dutch Defense or QGD against d4/c4 setups. For White, perhaps the English.

I'm beginning to suspect that the answer to question (2) is "No, genius, go work on question (1) instead!" :)