Zurich 1953 Openings Index

As a d4 player, Bronstein's famous book on the Zurich Tournament seems to be invaluable. I broke down all games into groups of openings. I think the best thing to do is to choose one opening and work through the best games in that opening so this index should help.

Openings Played, sorted by frequency:

46 King's Indians - 7, 13, 20, 28, 30, 42, 43, 45, 50, 51, 58, 61, 67, 72, 73, 75, 80, 91, 100, 105, 107, 108, 114, 126, 131, 132, 139, 143, 152, 154, 158, 171, 173, 178, 180, 183, 184, 186, 189, 192, 193, 197, 199, 204, 206, 207

42 Nimzo-Indians - 2, 9, 11, 12, 14, 17, 24, 26, 32, 39, 41, 44, 49, 52, 54, 64, 71, 77, 94, 102, 104, 110, 118, 122, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140, 150, 159, 160, 163, 167, 176, 182, 195, 200, 201, 203, 208, 209

25 Queen's Gambits - 8, 18, 21, 33, 34, 38, 56, 57, 62, 63, 68, 86, 93, 109, 115, 128, 130, 138, 151, 155, 170, 179, 190, 205, 210

I'll study these first. Here are the QG classified by variation:

Tarrasch = 33, 38, 62, 93, 130, 155, 210

Exchange = 8, 86, 109, 151, 170. 190

Slav = 34, 115, 128, 205

Orthodox = 56, 57, 68, 138

Accepted = 18, 21, 63

Ragozin (I think there might be another one or two of these that I mis-categorized) = 179

23 Sicilians - 35, 36, 60, 65, 66, 78, 88, 89, 90, 99, 101, 103,  119, 120, 123, 127,  135, 146, 161, 165, 175, 177, 198

15 Queen's Indians - 22, 29, 46, 59, 79, 84, 95, 106, 147, 148, 156, 166, 172, 188, 202

10 Ruy Lopezes - 4, 40, 47, 70, 92, 116, 142, 181, 185, 196

9 Retis - 10, 69, 74, 76, 111, 117, 124, 164, 169

8 Grunfelds - 15, 19, 25, 48, 55, 85, 98, 129

7 Englishes - 3, 82, 141, 145, 157, 162, 168

7 Old Indians - 31, 37, 87, 96, 113, 121, 174

6 French Defenses - 23, 53, 83, 97, 112, 125

4 Catalans - 1, 16, 153, 194

3 Benonis - 5, 6, 27

3 Dutches - 144, 149, 191

2 Caro-Kanns - 81, 187

An Idea for Openings

I'm still following the advice of "Don't memorize openings until XYZ rating" but I do want to start learning how to identify most popular openings. It started with a reddit post listing a ton of openings with both names and moves. I took that and ran with it. It had its share of errors so I made my own (part of my DIY-approach to improvement). From that reddit post, I took any of the opening names that I had at least heard of and put them in a spreadsheet. I added in a bunch of other variations that I thought were worth knowing or looked popular. Then using wikipedia and lichess (sidenote, you can also open the mobile app>Menu>Board Editor>Gear Symbol> and choose an opening to see the first moves), I populated all the moves for the openings I chose. I ended up with 89 openings.

I wanted to memorize them so I could say, "here's a Caro-Kann Advanced Variation" or "This game started with a Sicilian Rosslimo." It could be a launchpad into exploring the openings further down the line, or it could just help in communicating about chess in general and following commentators more easily.

Anyway, here's an image of my spreadsheet.

The actual spreadsheet has more columns for things like general ideas, external resources like youtube links on a given opening, tricks and traps, and common continuations. I'm slowly adding to that but my first objective is to memorize the names and moves of these 89 openings.

How to memorize?

I spend a lot of downtime at work (there's a lot for me) on chess stuff. I figure this is a good time to study openings, at least the basic opening moves, since it's pretty much an excel sheet with text so I don't have to have a chess site open or stare at lichess on my phone which might look suspicious to fellow co-workers. One caveat is that I had some portion of this list already known from my time playing some of the openings and also from putting the list together in general. Like they say in college, sometimes just writing the notes is enough to help you begin learning.

Here's my old school way of memorizing at work:

1. Pick a subset of the openings (like the e4 section for example). Re-acquaint yourself with each one, basically just read through each line. Like cramming before the test.

2. Then start at the top, hide the name column and for each line, read through the moves and write/type in a .txt file the name of the opening. Example: e4, e5, Nf3, Nc6, d4....is the Scotch Game.

3. Check over what you did in step 2 for errors. Take note of the ones you're struggling with.

4. Now go back through but hide the moves this time. For each opening name, mentally recite the moves.

5. Go through the subset a third time, hiding the moves again. For each opening name, write/type out the moves. 

6. Check your work noting the ones you're still struggling with.

7. Move on to other subsets until you've gone through the entire table. Then start fresh again but make your subsets larger. And pay special attention to the ones you've had a hard time memorizing. Feel free to take out the ones you absolutely know by heart. Consider using a real chess board at home to shake things up.

Eventually you'll have them all memorized. It will probably help to shuffle up the order of the subsets as you're going through this, and eventually shuffle the order of the full list of your openings.


Ideas for more study

* Pull an opening out of a hat, play through the moves on lichess' analysis board, and guess the most popular continuations from the opening database. 

* Add a column in your spreadsheet for "General Concepts" and use various resources to find out the common themes in each opening such as where the pawn break is, what files usually open, if it often leads to a minority attack, etc.

* Find a famous example of a game for each/most openings and play through it, annotate it, memorize it, etc.

Should I know openings?

No.

Just kidding.

Well.....

Know the principles. Play one opening all the time as white and play solidly as black. 

For example, I play QGD which is practically a system whereby I answer 1. ...d5 with c4 and Nc3 then from there it's a combination of either bringing my dark-squared bishop out first or just playing e3 and Nf3. I keep it easy. Of course, always react to what your opponent might be doing in case they play sub-optimally. Get yourself a small "system" like this where you know the first few moves you like to play as white and how opponents typically respond.

As black I just play solidly. I get a pawn or two fighting in the center, get at least three minors out and castle. That's it! I'm sure that's good enough for me to get to 90% classical lichess.

That's the quickest way to get a solid game started. Of course you'll want to start branching out with white at some point, otherwise you'll miss a lot. For example, I don't play 1. e4 so I never face the sicilian. That's something I'll want to start doing, perhaps after I reach my classical goal. It'll be interesting to track my progress with the change to 1. e4.

I think the goal for advanced beginners in the opening is to safely accomplish the opening principles without dropping material or having more than a +/- 1.0 engine evaluation. If you can do that in nine games out of ten you're doing well.

Familiarity with the opening names
I wouldn't concern myself with memorizing ten different openings twenty lines deep, but I do want to start familiarizing myself with names of the common openings.

When I watch a streamer, they might say, "We're going into the dutch here" or, "This is the scotch game." I have some ideas on a distinguishing move in openings they might play (for example, I know Dutch means an early f5 from black but that's pretty much it!) but I always thought it'd be nice to identify them more confidently. This reddit post provided a pretty good way to study the openings on a surface level:

https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/aw7jcw/chess_openings_updated/

Almost like a "name that tune" game, I'd like to be able to see the first four or fives moves from anything in this table and be able to identify the name of the opening. I'm not going to study all of them, but I think some brief familiarity can go a long way with them.

Here's the .jpg of the chart.

You could do this any number of ways. Maybe you break it up with the 1. e4 e5 lines and memorize them. Cover up the common name of the opening as you go down the line guessing the names. Reminds me of memorizing things 10 minutes before a college exam :/ but it's something! After this you could just look at the names of the openings from the chart, then open up the analysis board in lichess and try to play out the moves that make up that opening. The analysis board will label the opening for you so you got the moves correct!

Play Correspondence to Learn to Play Solidly
Correspondence is a great way to learn chess in general. I found a great way to check my opening ideas with it too. I usually have correspondence games ongoing on my phone and there's a simple way to check the analysis board in any given position. From that you can access an opening book that shows you the most common moves from GM games! I don't consult it right away in the opening but what I do is look at the position and come up with my candidate moves and I sometimes rank them. Then I check with the opening book to see if my move was one of the top-played moves. This can be an invaluable way to see how you're doing with opening principles, prophylaxis moves, pawn breaks et cetera without blindly memorizing lines.