Everybody plays some kind of openings, right?

I mean, you can’t play chess if you don’t play some form of opening with your first moves in each game.

When you start as a beginner, openings don’t matter a lot.

Games are won and lost mainly during the middlegame or the endgame, so you can easily recover after a bad start.

But when you become better and better, you start facing stronger opposition.

And then openings start to matter more.

You can’t simply play random moves and expect to make up for them later in the game.

Playing catch-up doesn’t work as well as when you were a beginner.

And then you need to spend some time on learning openings.

You need to start playing your first moves according to established opening theory.

Your moves at the beginning of the game should follow some rules and be laid out according to some logic.

But this means that you need to decide on which opening to invest your training time on.

Most players fall into a common trap at this point.

They choose their openings based on what the best chess masters play.

For example, there was a time when Ruy Lopez was the most popular opening as a response to 1.e4.

Later on, under the influence of the great Kasparov, every Black player was playing the King’s Indian Defense… until Kasparov dropped it himself after a few painful losses.

Openings come and go out of fashion or because of novelties that change the evaluation of each position.

For a chess player who doesn’t have lots of time to follow the latest opening trends, though, choosing openings based on what GMs play is NOT the smart choice.

The chess hack here is to think outside the box:

1. Determine what is your own playing style. Do you prefer aggressive attacking play or to patiently maneuver your pieces and improve your position? Do you enjoy sharp play and tactical combinations or strategic thinking and long-term planning? Do you like playing with as many pieces as possible on the board or reaching the endgame quickly with very few pieces left? Everyone feels more comfortable in different board positions. And yes, there is some merit in trying to be as universal a player as possible, but I will leave that for the professional chess players and not chess fans who just want to win more games like myself J
2. After you find out what positions you like to play, try to find openings that more often lead to such positions. For example, if you like to attack, consider playing the King’s gambit as White. If you like to remove the Queens from the board, consider the Berlin Wall as Black (that’s how Kramnik took the crown from Kasparov). There is an opening to suit everyone’s taste.
3. (This is optional) Out of all the candidate openings, choose the one that has decent results, but is not too extensive to learn. We all know that Sicilian Defense is probably the best answer for Black against 1.e4. But it is also a huge opening to learn, with whole sub-variations having their own books filled with theory. Would you be ready to invest all the necessary time to learn such an opening? I wouldn’t, but the decision is yours.
4. (This is optional too) Before settling on an opening, ask yourself whether it is too popular for your own good. When you start playing a popular opening, you should be prepared to face a big percentage of your opponents who will know how to play the opening from their side too. That means a)there’s no element of surprise whatsoever, b)you’d better have done very good homework, because inferior moves are more likely to get punished. That is exactly why I personally prefer to play less popular openings.