whats a good 1200 opening for white?
There's no one good answer. My own advice is:
1) Invest in a copy of some really good book such as "The Mammoth Book of Chess" which contains a digest of a lot of openings and some explanation of their positional, strategic, and tactical ideas.
2) Start off by playing the ones in which the good moves seem to come naturally to you. Doesn't matter if theoretically they give you no advantage. What matters is that you get through to a middlegame position in which you are comfortable and can find the Good Moves naturally. If you can play the position as well as or better than your opponent, you will prosper.
3) But if you want to improve and get really good also challenge yourself and try out a range of different openings including at least one "Hypermodern" line (1. b3 the Nimzo-Larsen is likely the safest one of these to experiment with). It's important to gain practical understanding of a diverse range of position-types.
4) For the love of God don't pay attention to anyone on these forums peddling their own pet opening and claiming it leads to some sort of Automatic Advantage. Assume all such claims are false and that they only reveal the limited intelligence and limited chess capabilities of the person posting. There is no such thing as the Advantage Guaranteed Opelening.
Top 3 Beginners Openings
1) Italian Game
2) London System
3) Kings Indian Attack
- Considered the Best
- The Most Competitive in Beginner levels
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Fun Lines I recommend to beginners:
1) Orangoutang Opening
2) Crab Opening
3) Whale Opening
- Consider Offbeat/Weird/Fun
- Noncompetitive
There's no one good answer. My own advice is:
4) For the love of God don't pay attention to anyone on these forums peddling their own pet opening and claiming it leads to some sort of Automatic Advantage. Assume all such claims are false and that they only reveal the limited intelligence and limited chess capabilities of the person posting. There is no such thing as the Advantage Guaranteed Opening.
What Ralph Hayward said +100
And I'll add below 2500 elo mark (gambits excluded) 99.9% of openings will do. Assume all such claims of saying otherwise are false and only revel the limited intelligence and chess abilities of the person posting counter opinions to the above