Question for good Chess players

[Jeraden]

I never really seriously got into playing chess, but I played a game the other day and it renewed my interest in it. I was looking at a chess forum and everyone was talking about specific named openings and maneuvers and everything - I had no idea what they were talking about. I was at the library the other day and decided to look at what chess books they had. They had a zillion of them. I skimmed through a book of chess openings and it was kind of interesting, they had different openings, the steps to accomplish them, and what to do to counter them, etc. They had similar books on mid-game and end-game.

So it got me wondering. Maybe I'm a bit ignorant about chess, but I never realized there were so many pre-planned specific move combos. Do good chess players rely a lot on these canned combos, or is that just a way to get started and then its more dynamic after that? I always thought chess as more of a free-form game with lots of thought required at each step. But seeing all those books kind of demystified it for me and now it seems like its just a bunch of memorizing certain situations and knowing what the "best" move is in that situation - kind of like poker/blackjack. Or maybe a combination of the two.

 

[torpid]

Yes, a decent chess player will study:

1) Openings. Start with a couple openings where you can control the variations to prevent going into an unknown transposition. Openings are extremely important. At the highest level, everyone knows the basic lines so well that it becomes a strategic decision which opening to play and whether to play some wild variation.

2) End game mating techniques. These are extremely important. Probably more than openings. If you don't know how to win with a king and rook vs king, you are screwed.

3) Pattern combinations (especially mating patterns)

4) Positional play. Modern vs Classic positional play.