White Opening Repertoire - Queen's Gambit Accepted: Part 1

Dear Chess Friends,

I started uploading my opening repertoire to my Patreon channel. If you want a strong repertoire for yourself, I highly recommend you to watch my videos in which I talk about opening lines and I explain middlegame strategies, too. I checked my lines with Stockfish, so they are completely reliable.

In the first video, I'm talking about one of the Queen's Gambit Accepted lines. Here is the link to that: https://www.patreon.com/posts/white-opening-3-116681519?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

I hope you'll find it useful. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to write to me.

Kind regards,

Gabor

I take advantage of your thread to ask a titled player ( rare occasion ) a question that always generates debate.

Is it really important or useful for we beginners to specifically study, in detail, openings and their lines ? Especially considering that at our level practically none of our opponents sticks to the expected moves ?

I wonder whether a detailed work on openings and their lines does not become useful much later. Can we limit ourselves to try to understand the middlegame plains that arise from them, or is knowledge of specific lines also necessary ?

Thank you

Dear Hoffmann713,

First of all, thank you for your question, that's a great one! Yes, this topic generates debate. I'll tell you my personal opinion about it, it's not a problem if a lot of people won't agree with me.

As I always tell my students, when you are at a beginner level (it's difficult to determine a concrete rating range but I would say that it means under 1500-1600 rating), you don't have to learn a lot of opening lines, you should rather focus on learning tactical motives, middlegame strategies and basic endgame knowledge. Of course, there are some gambit lines what you should know about and it requires to learn concrete moves in the opening (otherwise you could easily fall into a trap) but if we are not talking about tricky opening lines, it's more important to just apply the general opening principles at the beginning of the game (control the center with pawns and minor pieces, concentrate on development, move your king to a safe position, etc.) and get a basic knowledge about the plans what you should play for after the opening.

You are totally right when you write that most of the time your opponents don't really stick to the expected opening moves when you are also at a beginner level. On the other hand, as I experienced, a lot of beginners love playing gambit lines (there are a lot of video sources of them on the internet because those are more attractive, so content creators like talking about them). Because of that, you need to learn how to refute those tricky lines and it means you have to memorize some opening moves, it's not enough to just know some principles.

I, personally don't really believe in tricky gambit lines (now I'm not talking about the classical lines, like Queen's Gambit, which is not the gambit line what is incorrect and you just hope that the opponent doesn't know the refutation), I believe in the classical openings because you can play them in the long term (above 2000 rating, too) and you can learn classical middlegame strategies by studying and playing classical openings.

In my video courses about openings, I don't only talk about the opening moves but I explain the middlegame strategies, too. So, I don't leave my students alone at the time when the opening theory ends. Because of that, I would recommend my opening courses for beginners and advance players, too, I think everyone could find useful information in them.

I hope you find my answer useful and helpful, if you have any additional questions, don't hesitate to ask me. If you want to learn more but you wouldn't like to hire a private coach, you can subscribe to my Patreon channel where you can find daily puzzles in 4 levels with FREE subscription and if you choose a paid membership, you get access to all of my private videos, too. I'm planning on uploading 4-8 hours of educational videos per month, so I think it's quite a fair deal.

Kind regards,

Gabor