Best Chess Openings and How to Pick One for You

Pursuing a career takes more than just passion. It takes huge commitment. In chess career, it is no difference. To play better, appropriate opening strategies can come a long way. Although several chess openings are available to choose from, but picking the one that suits your style may not be as simple.

Among the not-so-many options, the most notable chess openings are these four.

1. The Scholar’s Mate

It consists of four moves and known as Mate in Four, as well. The perks of adopting this chess opening are that it does not take much time to learn and understand, and winning the game is going to be fast with this opening.

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2. The Scotch Opening

It begins with these moves: 1. e4 e5, 2. nf3 nc6, 3. d4. The advantages are this opening teaches you dynamic positions, flexibility and how to attack.

3. The Sicilian Defense

This opening is the best scoring counterattack to the e4 first move. Doing more than just helping you to understand the role of time in a chess game, it also allows you to quickly develop pieces and to clear pieces of the king side needed for castling.

4. The Spanish Opening

It involves the moves of e4 e5, nf3 nc6, and bb5. It is suitable for those who fancy solid opening, maintaining healthy structure and having the privilege to steer the play.

What is important to highlight is there is always an option to create a brand new opening apart from the four well known openings. Creating a novel opening surely takes a lot of preparation and practice, but novel moves tend to reward the player with victory. Luckily, with the current technology sophistication, chess game analysis and practice can now be done by the use computer and the Internet.

Best chess openings

How can you pick the perfect opening?

  1. You need to ensure that the opening of your choice brings joy in you
  2. You may want to know the possible positions resulting from your opening and consider your comfort with those positions
  3. The next step is to figure the amount of time to be devoted to learn and master the opening. If you have busy schedule and only have limited time, choosing openings with less demanding preparation and memorization will be ideal for you.
  4. Another tip is to avoid studying the unsound ones, like the Orangutan opening, which seems to work so well against an online opponent, but definitely not effective against professional players.
  5. You can also observe and learn from qualified chess players, like Russian grandmaster, Vladimir Kramnik, or the World Chess Champion originated from India, Viswanathan Anand. By doing this kind of observation and learning directly from the best, your likelihood to take after their powerful moves and styles will increase quite significantly.

Conclusion

Considering the options while keeping the above self notes in mind, the selection process of the chess opening should now be hassle free.