You might before have asked the question: "Should I memorize chess opening lines?" The answer is not as straightforward, and the reason lies in the game's staggering complexity. To illustrate, let's take a mind-boggling journey through the mathematics of chess. At move 1 there are 20 moves to pick from, after 3 moves 8,902 chess games. After just 10 half-moves into a game or after move 5, there are approximately 69 trillion possible chess games.
I am convinced that the study of openings is to extend our "comfort zone" so to speak. I have often heard that true learning starts at the edge of a person's comfort zone. That's why groan, "Oh no! Not another learning experience!" :-)
So, those positions that arrive when we are out of our preparation are where we can learn the most -- but we prefer to not have our learning happen when the stakes at their highest -- in an OTB tournament game, for example. So I am convinced that the best way to learn an opening from something like chessable is to give a personal look at the end position of what chessable now calls a "priority variation" and make our own conclusions about how we would play those positions -- to try to give yourself a "learning experience" when less is at stake.
It is impractical to memorize a chessable LTR -- but I have lengthy LTRs on chessable -- in fact I am anxiously waiting for Shankland's 3rd part of his Neo-Catalan LTR. I will definitely be looking at the priority variations --- and most importantly, I will be examining the end positions of those priority lines.
BTW, I am +2000 on lichess, around 1800 chess.com ... have been 1799 USCF.
Very good article Martin. Knowing one’s openings is important for many reasons. Memorizing them is a totally different game and your analysis points to why it is hard well, impossible. Of course there are many bad grains, but even tackling the good ones is virtually impossible. Watching super GMs playing proves that even at move 8 they are a making a huge effort to decide what to do or remember what cones next. Yes they do it with a huge baggage of knowledge in the thousands of games they played and studied, but it is still not Stockfish-like manner. To me, openings should be treated like maps. You need to know the general direction along with some landmarks and major roads or train stations. The more you travel and use the map the more you will remember it and figure out what side street to take when you hit a traffic jam.
It seems like I made a math conversion error in the sand grain calculation:
69,352,859,712,417 grains * 0.1 mm³/grain = 6,935,285,971,241.7 mm³.
To convert this to cubic meters, we should divide by 1,000,000,000
6,935,285,971,241.7 mm³ / 1,000,000,000 = 6,935.286 m³.
So the pile is not quite the as massive but only nearly 7000 m3, which is also something.. Sorry about that!
Loved this article, Martin.
I am convinced that the study of openings is to extend our "comfort zone" so to speak. I have often heard that true learning starts at the edge of a person's comfort zone. That's why groan, "Oh no! Not another learning experience!" :-)
So, those positions that arrive when we are out of our preparation are where we can learn the most -- but we prefer to not have our learning happen when the stakes at their highest -- in an OTB tournament game, for example. So I am convinced that the best way to learn an opening from something like chessable is to give a personal look at the end position of what chessable now calls a "priority variation" and make our own conclusions about how we would play those positions -- to try to give yourself a "learning experience" when less is at stake.
It is impractical to memorize a chessable LTR -- but I have lengthy LTRs on chessable -- in fact I am anxiously waiting for Shankland's 3rd part of his Neo-Catalan LTR. I will definitely be looking at the priority variations --- and most importantly, I will be examining the end positions of those priority lines.
BTW, I am +2000 on lichess, around 1800 chess.com ... have been 1799 USCF.
Very good article Martin. Knowing one’s openings is important for many reasons. Memorizing them is a totally different game and your analysis points to why it is hard well, impossible. Of course there are many bad grains, but even tackling the good ones is virtually impossible. Watching super GMs playing proves that even at move 8 they are a making a huge effort to decide what to do or remember what cones next. Yes they do it with a huge baggage of knowledge in the thousands of games they played and studied, but it is still not Stockfish-like manner. To me, openings should be treated like maps. You need to know the general direction along with some landmarks and major roads or train stations. The more you travel and use the map the more you will remember it and figure out what side street to take when you hit a traffic jam.